Unforgettable

by Jean Saunders

  7

  Gracie felt as if she had been rushing around like a mad thing for days, when in reality it had only been a few hours. But her whole life had changed again. Her father was dead, and she was still desperately trying to block out the gruesome sight she had been faced with in the unloading sheds at the docks. Whoever—or whatever—that was, it wasn’t her father.

  Her father was the man who had gone to work the previous day, and left his womenfolk relieved that he hadn’t come stamping and hollering into the house at bedtime, reeking of beer as usual. He was the young man who had swung her around in his arms when she was a small girl, filling her head with exciting stories about the big ships that came from faraway places to Southampton docks.

  Her father had once been a loving parent who hadn’t been consumed with drink … and now her mother was racked with guilt, knowing that the relief she and Gracie both felt, was because they no longer had to put up with his moods and tempers. And the guilt was doing Queenie no good at all.

  ‘I’ve given her something to calm her down,’ the doctor told Gracie. ‘She’s taken this badly, which is only to be expected, and she’ll need careful watching. Her heart is further weakened by the coughing and retching from her illness, and this shock is enough to tip her over the edge.’

  He never minced his words, and Gracie thanked him numbly. She had thanked the two men bringing them the news about her father, and voicing her gratitude at being warned of a death sentence seemed just as farcical.

  The doctor looked at her sharply. ‘You must take care of yourself as well, Gracie. You need to be strong for your mother now.’

  ‘I know. I don’t want her to go to the funeral, but she’s insisting on it.’

  ‘Don’t try to stop her,’ he said brutally. ‘She needs to say good-bye to your father properly, and it can’t make much difference in the long run.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Gracie said, hating him for what she knew damn well he meant.

  ‘My advice is to make the most of your mother while you’ve still got her. Now, about arrangements—if there’s anything I can do to help, let me know.’

  She could read his mind. They lived in a poor part of the town; they weren’t a well-off family, and if there was no money … She lifted her chin. ‘I shall see to everything, Doctor. Mum was always thrifty about life insurances, and she’s also been paying into a funeral club for years. We shall manage.’

  She stopped talking, afraid that her voice would break if she had to say much more. Queenie said the funeral club payments had been intended for the eventual death of both parents, though since the onset of her illness, it was obviously thought that she would go first. Nobody had expected Mick to die yet, especially in such a tragic manner, however ignominious. It was still the loss of a husband and father.

  A week later, Mick Brown was laid to rest, and the neighbours rallied round with pots of tea and sandwiches ready for when the two women returned from the churchyard. By tradition, they wouldn’t return to an empty house, and the curtains that had been drawn all the week, were pulled back to let in the daylight.

  A clutch of Mick’s workmates and drinking buddies had been at the graveside, some muttering good words about him, others looking embarrassed and awkward to be there at all. Gracie couldn’t help wondering savagely which of them had been involved in the punch-up that had led to her father staggering about in a drunken rage and which had eventually led to his death. But what did any of it matter now? The death had been recorded as accidental, and there had been enough witnesses to vouch for the way Mick had gone lumbering off in the night.

  All Gracie wanted was to get this day over. They didn’t invite people back to the house afterwards. Gracie had insisted that there was to be no bun-fight, and only the women neighbours who had helped with tea and sympathy would be there waiting for them. And Percy Hill.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ Gracie hissed to Mrs Jennings, when she had got her mother settled in an armchair with a cup of tea.

  ‘We couldn’t keep him out,’ Lizzie said resentfully. ‘Calls it his duty to pay his respects to one of his tenants, but he’s no more than a bloody leech, pardon the language, casting his eye over his property, and making sure the rent will still be paid now your dad’s dead and buried.’

  Gracie flinched, wishing she didn’t make it sound so final. Which it was, of course. No matter how solemnly the vicar intoned the words about life everlasting, and our brother Mick being sent to a higher place to be with his Maker, and all that religious stuff, it didn’t change anything. You were still dead and buried.

  She swallowed a sob, turned around and cannoned straight into Percy Hill, coming out of the parlour. His hands went out to steady her, and she was thankful she hadn’t yet taken off her costume jacket so that she didn’t have to feel the pressure of his fingers on her bare arms.

  ‘Steady now, Gracie. We don’t want two accidents in the family, do we?’ he said in his cloying voice. Even when he was trying to be sympathetic, which she presumed he was trying to be now, he still had that nasty little calculating gleam in his eyes.

  ‘Thank you for calling, Mr Hill,’ she said, keeping her voice distant. ‘My mother and I are bearing up quite well in the circumstances.’

  That was what you said, wasn’t it? Even when your heart was breaking, and you wished this oaf and his like to Kingdom Come, you said you were bearing up quite well in the circumstances.

  ‘We’ll be fine with our neighbours now, thank you,’ she went on pointedly, hoping he would take the hint. ‘Women need to be together at a time like this.’

  He pressed his hand over hers. It was clammy and moist, and she had an enormous job not to fling it away from her.

  ‘I understand, my dear. Just remember that you have a father figure in me, and if there’s any little thing I can do for you, you only have to ask. I’ll leave you now, and I’ll be along to see you at the end of the week.’

  For the rent money, of course. The blood money. For a moment, Gracie felt a violent urge to laugh out loud at his hypocrisy, and really thought she was going to do so. And how would that look on the day of her father’s funeral!

  But once he had left the house, the women relaxed, and began the custom of telling their own tales about the deceased, and their own shared experiences of child-bearing and deaths in an attempt to cheer up her mother. It was an odd kind of therapy to Gracie, but it was what they did, and it seemed to work, so that by the time they were at last alone, her mother had a little more colour in her cheeks and was actually smiling at some of their anecdotes.

  But it was short-lived, and in the next weeks Gracie had more to worry about than the regular visits of the landlord, as Queenie went downhill rapidly.

  ‘I know Dad’s death was an awful shock to her, but he led her such a life, that I thought she’d start to relax by now,’ Gracie told Lizzie Jennings.

  ‘It often happens,’ the neighbour said sagely. ‘You may have thought they didn’t get on, Gracie, but all married couples find their own pattern of living, and this was theirs. Now that he’s gone, she misses his tantrums and his yelling. They may have been a long time past the lovey-dovey stage, but I remember what it was like when my old man passed over. Me and him never had a good word to say about one another, but when he went it was like losing my right arm.’

  She made it sound like an exclusive sisterhood to which only widows belonged, and Gracie supposed that was exactly what it was. You couldn’t understand it because you had never experienced it. She shivered, knowing that she didn’t want to, either.

  ‘Is Percy Hill pestering you, Gracie?’ Lizzie said out of the blue. ‘I’ve seen him in the street more than usual lately.’

  ‘He’s called in a few times apart from collecting the rent to enquire after Mum. I suppose he’s only being considerate.’

  Lizzie snorted. ‘Considerate, my aunt Fanny! He knows damn well that your mum’s days are numbered, and once you’re left on your own he’ll have his eyes on
more than this house if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it, Mrs Jennings, and I wish you wouldn’t keep reminding me. I’m sure it’s all nonsense, anyway.’

  She was referring to Percy Hill, but she also didn’t need reminding about her mother’s condition. It was becoming all too clear to her that Queenie was a very sick woman and that she was unlikely to last out the time the doctor had suggested.

  ‘Just remember that all you have to do is knock on the wall when you need me,’ Lizzie said, taking no offence.

  She didn’t say ‘if’, just ‘when’, and since they both knew it anyway, Gracie nodded, feeling her heart heavy.

  She was too busy caring for her mother and continuing with her sewing jobs to worry about anything else. There was no other money coming in now, and the insurance policy on her dad’s life would dwindle away soon enough, so she needed the work to keep up the payments on the rent.

  There had been another letter from Davey Watkins, but she had merely answered it with a terse note to tell him the news about her father and to say she would write again when she felt able. It was the least of her concerns.

  Then came an indignant letter from Dolly, who, of course, had no idea of the traumatic events in Gracie’s life in recent weeks.

  What’s happened to you, gel? Dolly wrote. I never thought you’d be so stuffy as to forget your old pals. You said you was going to phone me and give old Warby a fright, but I’m still waiting. I hope it don’t mean your mum’s feeling worse, or that the worst has happened. Anyway, to cheer you up, I thought I’d let you know that me and Jim are still going strong. That’s a turn-up, ain’t it? Bet you thought I’d have ditched him by now. He’s all right, if a bit of a rough diamond, but I don’t have to tell you that, do I?

  We went to the Empire Exhibition at Wembley a couple of weeks ago, and fancied ourselves among the toffs. Some of the stuff there would make your eyes pop out. There was a band playing on the bandstand in the park, and people were dancing on the grass, so it was quite a hoot. Me and Jim had a bit of a dance too, and we’re going to go again sometime.

  Hurry up and phone me like you said, or write to me sometime, or I’ll think you’re getting too big for your boots what with your own little business and all.

  Your friend,

  Dolly Neath.

  Gracie gave a wry smile as she finished the letter. Her own little business indeed! Perhaps she had bumped it up a bit in what she had told Dolly about her sewing commissions, but that was for the sake of her pride as usual. She loved her mother and she didn’t want anybody feeling sorry for her in having to come back home to care for her.

  She knew very well why she was letting her thoughts ramble on. It was simply to avoid the other sentence in Dolly’s letter that she had written so carelessly. The bit about seeing the band in the park, and people dancing on the grass in the warm sunshine, and the pictures it sent to Gracie’s mind. If she closed her eyes very tightly, she could imagine herself being there, whirling around on the sweet-scented grass in someone’s arms, with the sound of the music high on the summer breeze. It wouldn’t be Charlie’s arms that held her, of course, because he would be taking his place on the bandstand, his lips on the mouthpiece of his saxophone, his fingers caressing the buttons and producing that wonderful sound.

  ‘Gracie, can you come in, dear?’

  The sound of her mother’s reedy voice shattered the illusion at once, and she went into the front room almost angrily—not at her darling mother—but because she still couldn’t rid her mind of Charlie Morrison’s image, when she knew there was no future in her dreams of him.

  ‘What is it, Mum? Can I get something for you?’ she asked, trying not to notice how painfully thin her mother had become. She had eaten little enough before, but since Mick’s death she had gone completely off her food. What she did eat, she rarely kept down for long.

  ‘Another tablet, please dear,’ Queenie whispered.

  ‘Is the pain very bad?’ Gracie said, her fingers opening the packet so nervously she nearly scattered them all over the bed. They both knew it wasn’t time for her to take another pill, but if she needed it, it seemed cruel to deny her the temporary relief it gave her.

  ‘It’s tolerable,’ Queenie said, as she always did. Which Gracie interpreted as meaning that it was bloody bad.

  Queenie retched on the tablet as she tried to swallow it, and spilled half the glass of water on to the bed as her hands shook uncontrollably.

  ‘Never mind, Mum. I’ll crush another one for you and put it in a little drop of water,’ Gracie told her, and fled to the scullery, her own hands shaking at the task. With every day that passed, her mum got weaker, and she could see her slipping away as the pain and the illness ravaged her.

  There were times when she found herself resenting her father for what was assumed to have been his quick death, and was immediately full of shame at the thought. But how long could this go on? She longed to keep her mother alive for ever, but she couldn’t bear to see her becoming so frail.

  ‘You’re a good girl, Gracie,’ Queenie said, when she had finally got the crushed pill down, and lay back on her pillow. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you. But remember what I said. When all this is over, go back to your friends in London and start a new life.’

  ‘Mum, I don’t want to hear this kind of talk!’

  ‘I’m not afraid to say it, love. We both know I’m dying, but you’ve got all your life in front of you. Don’t settle for second best.’

  ‘You mean Davey Watkins, I suppose?’ Gracie said, without thinking.

  ‘Him, and a house like this. I want better things for you, Gracie.’

  Gracie felt choked. ‘I didn’t have better things in London, Mum, sharing digs with Dolly and working in a sweatshop! Besides, there are so many memories here. This is where I was born, no matter what kind of a house it is.’

  ‘And it’s where I’ll die, but I don’t want that for you. Promise me, Gracie, that you’ll always strive for better.’

  She was starting to look exhausted from so much talking. Blue shadows had appeared around her lips, and Gracie was suddenly alarmed.

  ‘I’ll promise anything you like, Mum, as long as you get some rest now. I won’t do any more work today—’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Queenie said wearily. ‘You know I like to hear the sound of your sewing-machine.’

  ‘All right, as long as it doesn’t disturb you.’

  She bent down and kissed her mother’s forehead as her eyes closed. The rise and fall of her chest was so slight now that it hardly made a movement beneath the bedclothes. Gracie watched her briefly before tiptoeing back to the parlour and the blouse she was working on for one of her clients. It was difficult to do anything for a few minutes though, because her eyes were so blurred with tears. It was hard to concentrate, but the lady in question wanted the work done urgently.

  By mid-afternoon the blouse was finished and neatly ironed, and no one would ever know it had been altered, Gracie thought with satisfaction. A smile curled around her lips as she remembered Dolly’s remark about her own little business. Fat chance. But there was a small circle of ladies in the town now, willing to pay for her services. Word had spread that she was a reliable, excellent seamstress. It was hardly a business, but it was a thriving little sideline.

  The smile faded, knowing it had better be something more than that if she was to survive on her own. Her dad’s insurance money wouldn’t last for ever. When her mum went, there would be a life insurance payment due for her too, but that was too upsetting and ghoulish for Gracie to think about.

  She glanced in at her mum and saw that she was sleeping peacefully, and then she wrapped the blouse in tissue paper before parcelling it carefully in brown paper. She took off her work overall, combed her hair and put on a lick of lipstick before she put on her cotton gloves and left the house. She prided herself on looking as neat and tidy as possible before entering the best town houses.

>   She came away carrying a bolt of cotton material and a pattern for a child’s frock. It gave her such a fillip to be making something new, and this time it wasn’t just one article to make. There was a private nursery school in the upper town, and the little girls were all to wear identical clothes. Gracie was commissioned to make them for a lovely fat fee. It was something to make her heart sing, and to make her mother proud.

  She felt so joyous she decided this was the perfect time to telephone Dolly and give her the latest news. She must tell her about her dad too, she reminded herself guiltily, knowing she hadn’t been able to do that yet. But Dolly had always been one for the living and not the dead, and she’d be pleased that Gracie was finding work in such a backwater as Southampton. Gracie grinned, hearing Dolly’s dismissive voice in her head, when in reality, everybody knew that Southampton was an important shipping area. In Dolly’s mind, though, the world began and ended in London.

  Gracie went into the house quietly, but Queenie was still sound asleep, and she looked so peaceful that Gracie was reluctant to waken her, even though she was bursting with her news. Instead, she spent a little time spreading out all the pattern pieces on the parlour table and studying the detailed instructions. Then she thought about what to make her mum for supper that would be tasty and enticing. Beef tea seemed to be the most palatable lately, Gracie thought with a sigh, but at least there was some nourishment in it, so that would probably be the best idea.

  The knock on the front door made her jump. She answered it quickly, praying it hadn’t disturbed her mother. Though such a thought seemed almost tragic. She would be getting all the rest in the world soon enough.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Mr Hill, I forgot it was rent day. I don’t have it ready yet.’

  ‘That’s all right, my dear, I can wait.’

  He was inside the house before she could stop him, right behind her as she returned to the parlour, and she kept her back to him as she opened the bureau drawer where the rent money was kept, her fingers flustered and her heart beating faster than usual.