All Fall Down

by Jenny Oldfield

  ‘It ain’t right though, is it? There’s Bill to think of . . .’

  ‘Yes.’ Hettie knew none of the details about Edie’s own marriage. ‘You don’t hold with divorce, do you, Ett?’ Edie knelt on the fireside rug, not able to control which way her thoughts ran.

  ‘Not for myself. But I try not to judge.’

  ‘And what would you do if you weren’t happy?’

  ‘How, not happy?’

  Edie looked down at her upturned palms. ‘If, say, your old man knocked you about a bit.’

  Hettie let this sink in.

  ‘I don’t mean to say all the time, just now and then,’ Edie went on quickly. ‘If his temper was bad and, of course, he would regret it straight after, tell you he was sorry . . .’

  Hettie knelt beside her. ‘I don’t know that I could put up with it, Edie, even now and then. I can only say how I would feel; every time he laid a hand on me it would shock me rigid, wondering how he could do such a tiling than how much it actually hurt.’

  Tears came to Edie’s eyes. ‘And would you tell someone? You don’t think that would be letting him down?’

  Slowly Hettie shook her head. ‘I couldn’t keep it to myself, I know that.’

  ‘And if the first person you told promised he would look after you, would you be tempted?’

  ‘Anyone would.’

  ‘But would you?’ It was as if Edie judged herself through Hettie’s answers.

  ‘I’d want to be looked after,’ she agreed.

  Edie sighed. ‘And then you’d be stuck.’

  ‘I would?’

  ‘Yes, ’cos your husband might get to know, even if he ain’t on the spot and, knowing his temper, you’d be afraid he would take it out on the one who wanted to take care of you.’

  ‘And take it out on me, too.’ Hettie saw the point. ‘And then, of course, I could be stuck another way, if this person who cares is married already.’ They’d come full circle.

  Edie stopped mincing words. ‘That’s it, bull’s eye. It’s a mess, ain’t it?’

  ‘Here, dry your hair.’ Hettie handed her another towel. ‘It probably looks worse from the inside, but you still shouldn’t go charging out while the siren’s going. If you get yourself blown up everyone’s gonna end up miserable, ain’t they?’

  Edie managed a smile. ‘Only Tommy. He’d do anything for me. You know he’s fixing up the flat with anything he can lay his hands on. He got the windows put back in last week, the first in the block.’

  ‘Like I said, he loves you to death.’

  ‘You don’t mind me going on about it?’ As she calmed down, Edie turned shy.

  ‘Mind? Edie Morell, why should I mind? I only wish I had the answer.’ She stood up and spread Edie’s wet dress along the top of the fireguard.

  ‘That’d be too much to expect.’ She took a hairbrush from the table and began to sweep her dark blonde hair back over her shoulders. ‘If I had a sister, Ett, she’d be just like you.’

  ‘Well, you’re family now, Edie, you remember that. We love having you here, so you stay as long as you like. And go when you’re ready. Just one thing . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Take your time. Don’t jump. You’ll find that’s the best way.’

  Upstairs, Hettie’s soothing voice worked its magic, while downstairs the survivors from Nelson Gardens pulled themselves together on a diet of hot soup and rumours of Jerry’s imminent comeuppance.

  ‘Blimey, this is worse than the Blitz!’ Bobby Parsons drew Jimmie O’Hagan to one side after he’d walked into the pub alongside Tommy, straight into Dorothy’s line of fire.

  ‘What’s up, can’t you take it?’ Her caustic voice had sailed over the soup queue to where Tommy demanded a large whisky from George Mann.

  He ignored her. It had been a close shave, dragging Jimmie down the Tilbury shelter just as the raid started. As luck would have it, the all-clear had brought them up onto Liverpool Street, smack into an unexploded bomb, still ticking away nicely. It had gone up in their faces, killing two and injuring a whole lot more. He’d taken a cut on his leg, where a piece of shrapnel had torn through his trousers. It bled long and hard before an ambulance girl got round to strapping it up. If ever he heeded a drink and a rest from Dorothy’s scorn, it was now.

  ‘Oh, my God, he’s limping, a real old peg-leg.’ She didn’t care what people thought of her, for what did she owe anybody round here? Every time she walked into this place she got the evil eye from Annie Parsons, all because she made an effort to keep up appearances and could still bring the men flocking round. And they obviously took Tommy’s side over this mockery of a marriage. But they didn’t know what he was like to live with; uncommunicative, always wanting his own way. He’d driven her into Charlie Ogden’s arms, literally driven her. And now she got the blame. Like everyone else today, she was thrown off-balance by events. ‘Don’t tell me you copped it, Tommy? Or did you walk into a lamppost when you was the worse for wear?’ The more he ignored her, the higher her voice rose.

  ‘You shut your nasty mouth,’ he warned. His leg hurt, the drink went straight to his head.

  ‘Or else what?’ She outstared Dolly Ogden sitting nearby, getting up to push through the queue to reach him.

  ‘Look, if you two want to have a barney, could you go home and have it?’ George looked with disgust at them both. Annie took the soup ladle and rapped it against the metal pot.

  ‘No, come on Tommy, what you gonna do to shut me up?’ She used the mindless taunting he hated most. She would bait him, then turn round and walk away. ‘I dare say there’s a few round here who’d like a lesson from you on how to shut their old ladies’ cake-holes.’ She winked at a couple of men in the queue.

  ‘Are they always at each other’s throats like this?’ Bobby asked Jimmie, who’d turned scarlet.

  ‘This is nothing. Just you wait.’ He shuffled into a corner, waiting for one or other to blow a fuse.

  ‘Ain’t it typical, all mouth and no trousers. Tells me to pipe down, then does sod-all about it,’ Dorothy sneered.

  ‘You’re drunk,’ he said sullenly.

  ‘And what if I am? I just had a narrow escape at Nelson Gardens, and a fat lot you care.’ She checked her make-up in the mirror behind the bar.

  ‘Didn’t smudge your lipstick, did it?’

  George frowned harder. There’d be no merit in beating Dorothy at her own game.

  ‘A lot you care about my lipstick,’ she sneered. ‘It ain’t your colour, from what I hear.’

  Tommy gritted his teeth. She’d be as well to leave Edie out of this.

  ‘I’m surprised you ain’t taken the trouble to track down that particular colour since you limped home. Velvet Rose, ain’t it? Max Factor, gift-wrapped. Along with them pairs of nylons and boxes of chocolates.’

  ‘Leave off,’ Annie growled from behind her ladle. ‘I don’t want no nastiness.’

  But Dorothy was ready to take on the world. It was true, the blast at the shelter had shaken her up. She’d lost Charlie in the dark chaos and had to get herself out with no one to help. But in her case, sudden vulnerability turned straight to irrational anger; Tommy was her husband. He should have been there for her. ‘What’s nasty about that? It ain’t me, it’s Tommy and Edie Morell you should be having a go at.’

  Annie mumbled something about the pot calling the kettle black, just as Hettie came down to investigate the raised voices. Tommy slammed down his glass.

  ‘See, he knows I’m right. You’re dying to find out if she’s all right, ain’t you? Your precious lady friend. Well tell him, Annie, she’s right as rain, worse luck. The last I saw of her she was out looking, out of her mind because she couldn’t find you. I ran slap-bang into her and told her not to worry, the booze would get to you before Jerry did.’

  He rounded on her, pushing her to one side. Dorothy fell against the bar.

  ‘You see that?’ She rubbed her arm in protest. But if she was hoping for a display of violence she was di
sappointed. Tommy rubbed a hand across his eyes, then ducked his head as he pushed his way through the crowd of onlookers.

  ‘Where’s he off to now?’ Bobby watched him disappear through the door.

  ‘God knows. He’ll probably end up at the shop, sleeping on the floor. Me too, worse luck.’ To Jimmie this was all too grimly familiar.

  ‘But it’s Sunday, ain’t it?’ Bobby tried to make out exactly what was going on.

  ‘Black Sunday, never mind Black Saturday.’ Jimmie lit up a fag. ‘In full view!’ Dolly complained once things had quietened down sufficiently for her voice to be heard. It seemed likely tonight that they would all get a night in their own beds for a change. Black clouds hung over London like a thick blanket, too thick for the planes to get through. ‘Showing herself up and dragging that poor girl’s name through the mud.’ She couldn’t find a good word to say about Dorothy O’Hagan.

  Hettie said she thought she was probably very unhappy and scared, like everyone else.

  ‘Who’s side are you on?’ Dolly said sharply.

  She refused to be drawn. ‘No one’s. What’s the point?’

  ‘No, I expect you’ll just say a prayer instead.’ She didn’t like Hettie to go all sanctimonious on her.

  ‘I expect I will.’ Hettie cleared glasses. ‘For them all.’

  ‘Include my Charlie in that, will you?’ Dolly said, suddenly repentant. Hettie was so good and kind-hearted she didn’t deserve to be teased. Anyway, it was no laughing matter when your son went off the rails with a married woman, and that woman happened to be Dorothy O’Hagan.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘Every Night Something Awful!’ Jimmie shared his cigarettes with Meggie and Bobby. ‘Get it? ENSA; Every Night. . .’

  ‘. . . Something Awful!’ Bobby’s broad face broke into a grin. They were gathered round the wireless at his place, tuned into a variety show. Jimmie was busy avoiding the inevitable showdown at his house, while Meggie had fled from another tiff with her mother over the amount of time she spent at Bernhardt Court.

  ‘It ain’t funny, Jimmie.’ Meggie felt they shouldn’t make light of Tommy’s problems. She struggled to swallow a puff of the sharp smoke without coughing, using the cigarette as a signal that she was old enough to know her own mind. Still, she found inhaling the stuff unpleasant and difficult.

  ‘Ain’t it?’ He fiddled with the timing knob. The radio whistled and hummed. ‘You gotta laugh, or you’d bleeding well cry.’

  ‘You mean, they’re at it every single night?’ Every night something awful. She couldn’t imagine a house so full of discord. Her own parents rarely quarrelled. The boys could be rowdy at times, there would be a sharp word from Sadie, even a tap on the leg, but it was soon forgotten. That’s why her disagreement with her mother over Ronnie was so hard to deal with, casting a shadow over an otherwise loving atmosphere.

  ‘Every chance they get,’ Jimmie reported. ‘She riles him, he ignores her, so she goes at him again, nag-nag-nag. Why hasn’t he done this? How come he finds time to do that? When was the last time he came home sober? On and on.’

  ‘Why’s he put up with it?’ Bobby asked the logical, unmarried man’s question.

  ‘He keeps saying he won’t for much longer.’

  ‘And why do you have to?’

  Another shrug.

  ‘Where would he go, stupid?’ Meggie was equally succinct.

  ‘Anywhere.’

  ‘Like, where for instance?’ She’d thought this one through for herself. ‘Hitler’s bombed out half of London, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ There were always queues of homeless people on the steps of the War Damage Bureau as she passed by on her way to and from work. The few lucky ones managed to get themselves rehoused by billeting officers, but the majority stayed with family, or crammed into the rest centres to sleep on floors and feed at the WVS mobile canteens.

  Jimmie kept quiet during the spat between the cousins. He had the feeling that he was, in fact, the only reason why Tommy tried to hold things together with Dorothy; to give him a roof over his head. ‘Maybe I’ll just flit anyhow,’ he told them. ‘Whether or not I got somewhere to go.’

  ‘Oh don’t do that!’ Meggie cried. She brushed fallen ash from her navy-blue slacks.

  ‘Why not? Would you miss me?’ He winked at Bobby.

  ‘Course we would.’ She coloured up and angrily stubbed the fag out. ‘It ain’t funny, Bobby.’

  Jimmie sprang up and pulled her to her feet, to dance her round the living room. ‘We’ll meet again . . .’ he crooned, ‘Don’t know where, don’t know when . . .’

  Meggie thumped him on the shoulder.

  ‘. . . But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day.’

  ‘This is it then?’ Dorothy watched warily as Tommy flung clothes into a battered suitcase.

  ‘You’ve gone too far.’

  ‘Me? What about you?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it, right?’ He wouldn’t discuss Edie. ‘Let’s just call it a day.’

  She chain-smoked, following him from room to room. ‘Just like that? Finished.’ She snapped her fingers, barred his way as he made for the bathroom.

  ‘No, not just like that. What do you think – that I’m enjoying this?’

  ‘What I think is, you can’t wait to jump into bed with that little trollop.’

  ‘Wrong!’

  Her bitterness spilled over in a distorted version that left out of account her own affair with Charlie and cast her in the role of abandoned wife. ‘I reckon you can’t get out of here fast enough.’

  ‘Right.’ They stood eye to eye. Dorothy flinched as he pushed past to get his shaving gear.

  ‘Where will you go?’

  No answer. He didn’t know. First he would pack up, then he would go and find Jimmie.

  ‘Will you keep the shop going?’

  ‘I ain’t about to cut off my own nose to spite my face, am I? Course I’ll keep it going.’

  ‘I ain’t moving out of here,’ she warned. The picture of future events only gradually took shape. If the shop stayed open, that meant that Edie would still be working in the office. Not a nice idea to swallow.

  ‘I never asked you to.’ He glanced round the flat full of gadgets he’d fitted, furniture he’d bought. ‘You’re welcome to it.’

  ‘And I want an allowance.’ She flicked hard at her lighter, which refused to work. She shook it, then threw it onto a low table. When he didn’t commit himself to paying over any money, she panicked. ‘You owe me. You can’t just leave me in the lurch!’

  ‘Oh, can’t I?’ He snapped the case shut, then veered away from another battle. ‘OK, you’ll get money, don’t worry. I’m sick of playing games with you, you hear? Sick of them.’

  ‘I never started it.’

  ‘Who did then?’ He was looking round for the last time, picking up the case, saying goodbye to a chunk of his life.

  ‘We both did.’

  It was the first sincere thing she’d said in ages. He let the case slide flat again. ‘How come.’

  ‘You never loved me, Tommy, not really. I knew that as soon as we got married.’ Her voice edged towards tears as she sat heavily on the bed.

  Wrongfooted, he didn’t jump in to deny it. Maybe it was true. Maybe, before Edie, he never knew what love was.

  ‘You thought you did, but really you never. Then you thought you’d cover it up by giving me things to keep me happy. That was your way.’

  He was astonished. ‘I treated you well, didn’t I?’ All this was a revelation. In his eyes, Dorothy had expected the presents, the trips to the cinema and the seaside. He’d always found her demanding in this direction, thought she gave him freedom to go out to the pub and the football.

  ‘Like a princess,’ she said flatly. ‘But you’d have done as much for anyone; for your ma when she was alive, for Jimmie. It wasn’t as if I was special.’

  ‘I asked you to marry me, didn’t I?’

  ‘Only after I’d done all the run
ning, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ She’d had to pull out all the stops; the perfume, the low-cut dresses. After all, she was years older than Tommy, a woman with an already tarnished reputation. With his thriving business, quick wit and lively personality, Tommy was seen as a good catch.

  ‘I never,’ he admitted, feeling a fool.

  ‘No, you wouldn’t.’ She blew her nose. ‘You never noticed nothing about me, not really.’

  He began to think this was all true. Sitting there, she looked defeated, yet he’d always thought of her as tough. ‘What are you saying, that all this carrying on with Charlie and the others was just to get your own back?’

  ‘Bingo!’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Why else would I latch onto Charlie Ogden?’

  ‘Don’t you like him, then?’

  She shrugged and reached for another cigarette. ‘Have you got a light? Charlie’s Charlie, ain’t he?’

  ‘Does he know you don’t like him?’

  ‘I never said that. Anyhow, he don’t like me much neither, so there’s two of us.’

  Tommy took a deep breath. The idea of using another person as a means of retaliation struck him as shocking. He used people to make money, it was true; but they always knew what he was up to and drove a hard bargain. But to pick up an unsuspecting bloke going through a hard time of his own was, to Tommy, something you didn’t do. ‘Am I the fool, or what?’

  ‘You said it.’ She inhaled deeply, her hand trembling, her face drawn.

  ‘You talk about me not loving you, but what about the other way around? I reckon you was out to get all you could out of me, right from the start, like I was a soft touch or something.’

  This time she didn’t answer. Let him think that. She wouldn’t admit now that she’d started out head over heels in love with him.

  ‘Right.’ He snapped his mouth shut with a short laugh. ‘I learned my lesson there, then.’

  ‘Better late than never.’

  His mind flew back through the years; all the right things done for the wrong reasons, the long disillusionment. ‘If you never loved me, why marry me?’

  She hesitated. ‘It wasn’t just to get what I could out of you. I thought I could get you to love me.’