Saunders threw back his head and laughed. ‘Yeah,’ he said amiably, ‘and you and the rest of the girls are all gonna give up the game and start working for a living.’
Lilly almost joined in with a little laugh of her own – anything to keep on his good side and to save herself another hiding – but she counted herself lucky she hadn’t: in a split second his expression had changed to one of fury.
He leaned forward and smacked the table so hard the ashtray rattled around like a spun coin in a game of pitch and toss. ‘Give me some credit, Lil, for fuck’s sake. Now, let’s have a bit of truth, shall we? Number one – Marge swears you ain’t working a foreigner.’
‘I ain’t—’
‘So it wasn’t a pimp or some punter you picked up what did it?’
Lilly swallowed hard. What she wouldn’t have given for a large scotch. ‘It was a punter,’ she said carefully. ‘But one I took home from the club. He liked a bit of rough stuff.’
He held out his hand. ‘So where’s my cut?’
Lilly dropped her gaze and stared at the table. ‘I never got no money off him.’
Saunders narrowed his eyes. He didn’t appreciate being treated like a mug. ‘So who was he, this bloke what gave you a slap and never even paid you for it? Never paid you mind, which means I don’t get paid either.’
‘I don’t know his name.’ Lilly’s voice was barely audible, as she shrank back in her chair like a terrified child.
Saunders ground out his almost unsmoked cigarette. He was really losing patience. He had better things to do with his time than spend it arguing with toms, but he had to show that he could keep discipline or they’d all be working foreigners.
‘You know the rules,’ he snarled. ‘No one takes home no one they don’t know. Then I don’t risk losing my cut ’cos you’ve been tucked up by some con man, now do I?’
Lilly let out a little shuddering sigh. ‘I’m sorry,’ she sniffed.
‘Don’t bother with the old flannel, Lil. Just tell me who it is. And don’t bother to lie to me. I’ll find out one way or another.’
‘I can’t. I’m too scared.’
‘Look, Lil, I might be a nasty bugger at times, but you know I’d never raise a hand to a woman.’
‘It ain’t you I’m scared of,’ she said, lying through her teeth – any tom with any sense of self-preservation learned to be scared of all men from very early on in their careers; too many men thought they could treat them like punch-bags.
‘I’ll protect you from whoever it is, all right? Now I can’t say fairer than that, can I? But I mean it, Lil, I wanna know. ’Cos I ain’t having no one taking liberties with no one who works for me. It’s a piss take and I ain’t having that. I ain’t gonna stand for that from no one. And that includes you.’
Dropping her chin, Lilly closed her eyes and began to talk quickly. She wanted to get it over with. ‘All right, I’ll tell you. I did know him. He wasn’t a punter. That’s why I never told no one. I wasn’t trying to keep your cut, Mr Saunders. I swear, on my mother’s life.’ She lifted her chin and looked directly into his eyes. Pleading with him to believe her. Marge was right, just the thought of going back on the streets was too much even to contemplate and maybe, with a bit of luck, Saunders wouldn’t smack her one.
‘It started out all right,’ she went on. “Cos I took him back to my room as a favour, see. Not to do business. His wife had chucked him out and he had nowhere else to go. She’s a rotten old cow, Mr Saunders, he’s had to put up with murder off her for years and—’
‘Lilly.’ Saunders’s voice was menacingly calm. ‘Would you do me a favour and stop all this old shit and just tell me the truth? Would you just explain what any of this has got to do with the state of your boat?’
She took a long drag on her cigarette, pulling the smoke deep into her lungs, then shrugged and stared down at her lap. ‘I knew we was gonna do it, I suppose.’ It was as though she was talking to herself. ‘But there was never any question of money being involved. It weren’t like that.’
‘So, you’ve been giving it away for free, eh, Lil? That ain’t very bright, now is it? At least if you was working a foreigner there’d be a bit of sense in it.’ He shook his head as though unable to believe the stupidity of what he was hearing. ‘Go on,’ he said wearily.
‘He’s always been a bit on the handy side, ever since I’ve known him. He’d only have to get a bit upset over something and he’d give me a little slap.’
‘A little slap!’ Saunders’s voice was incredulous.
Lilly looked up at him and began to cry. ‘He just sort of went raving mad. Kicking me and punching me, and then he . . .’ She shook her head, unable to go on, unable to describe the humiliating things he had put her through.
Saunders was shaking with temper, he felt ready to rip someone’s head from their shoulders. Someone had had the gall to interfere with his business. To keep one of his girls off work and lose him money. To damage his property. His property. He’d kill the bastard slag when he got hold of him.
‘Think carefully, Lil,’ he warned the now sobbing woman. His voice was even, measured. ‘Tell me his name, there’s a good girl.’
‘Ted,’ she sobbed. ‘Ted Martin.’
Chapter 7
IT WAS SIX o’clock on a hot July afternoon, less than a week since Ginny had sat in the Railway Arms, confiding in her supposed friend, Dilys Chivers.
Jeannie Thompson was standing waiting in her kitchen doorway, picking her teeth with a broken matchstick, staring into the middle distance and thinking hateful thoughts. Jeannie couldn’t bear waiting.
She was forty-one years old, but, with a good light, she could just about pass for fifty. She was what could best be described as frazzled-looking. Her mass of matted hair – bleached a startling, unnatural orangy yellow – contrasted starkly with the dark brown of her roots and of her tobacco-stained teeth. And with the red of her mottled, vein-threaded skin, she looked a more than sorry sight. Jeannie was a hardened drinker by anyone’s standards and it showed. Just as the squalor in which she lived showed her not to be a student of the school of good housekeeping.
‘Well,’ she said to the manky ginger cat that was threading a path in and out of her bare legs, ‘if the silly tart don’t turn up soon, she can forget it. I’ve got better things to do with my time than standing about waiting.’
She bent down and picked up the mangy creature, cradling it to her well-upholstered bosom. It emitted a desultory purr.
‘Mind you, if she don’t turn up, Twinks, you can forget your fish supper. It’ll be scraps again for you, my little pet.’
She planted a loud, wet kiss on the animal’s head, which had the immediate effect of driving it into a frenzy of flat-eared, stiff-tailed anger. Escaping from her grip with a wild-eyed leap, the cat spat and hissed its way to the floor, leaving Jeannie’s front smothered in ginger hairs.
It then shot out of the kitchen and, with dead-eyed accuracy, darted through the open street door, along the weed-infested path and between Dilys’s splayed legs to feline freedom.
‘Bloody, rotten, flea-bitten moggy!’ Dilys yelled, aiming her toe at the creature’s rear. ‘Nearly had me off me sodding feet!’
Ginny clung to the gatepost. She had felt sick all day, but now, looking at this terrible place, she felt worse than sick, she felt completely disgusted. The house not only looked repulsive, but, even from the street, it smelt absolutely rank. Her twitching nostrils were filled with a sickly sweet stench, like the inside of a rubbish bucket that had been left to fester and moulder. There was a smell of stale cabbage about it, and something Ginny couldn’t begin to describe, let alone name.
She grabbed hold of the post more urgently, anchoring herself as firmly as a barnacle stuck to a Thames barge at high tide. How could she even have considered doing this? It was madness. She would go home, tell Ted and everything would be okay.
It would just have to be.
‘I can’t do it, Dilys.’ She shook
her head determinedly. ‘I can’t. I can’t go in there.’
Dilys gripped Ginny’s arm and tugged her roughly. ‘Look, Ginny,’ she said through gritted teeth, ‘you either do it this way, or you go home, dose yourself up with slippery elm, stick a knitting needle up your fanny and probably wind up with blood poisoning – if you don’t bleed to death first. So what are you gonna do?’
Ginny screwed her eyes tight and began weeping silently.
‘At least this way you know you’ll be safe,’ Dilys reasoned. ‘Only uses best yellow soap, does Mrs Thompson. She’s well known for it. Never uses none of that old—’
Realising what sort of an impression she was giving, Dilys added hurriedly: ‘Not that I know anything about it, of course, but it’s what everyone says. And she’s got a proper rubber syringe and everything. None of that scraping and digging about.’
Ginny felt the sweat breaking out on her top lip. ‘No, Dilys. Please.’
‘Now you listen to me, Ginny Martin. It’s a bit late to start acting up now.’ Dilys was growing angrier and more desperate; surely the stupid cow wasn’t going to change her mind and go through with having the bloody kid? That’d really mess things up. ‘If you’d had any sense in the first place, you’d have got yourself some Rendell’s—’
‘Please, Dilys. Don’t.’
‘Well, it’s you what got yourself in this state, innit?’ Dilys paused as something occurred to her and then, with an even more callous lack of sympathy than usual, she actually started giggling. ‘Here, d’you know old dozy-drawers in Dispatch? That Mary whatever her name is? Well, on her wedding night, she only thought she had to swallow the Rendell’s, didn’t she? Instead of . . .’ Dilys raised an eyebrow and nodded downwards. ‘Sticking ’em up her you-know-what. Must have been foaming at the mouth like a sodding mad dog. Still it worked. She went bright green from the vile taste of it and spent the night with her head down the lav. Put her old man right off his stroke, that did. Never got up the duff that night, though, did she!’
All the talk about douches and scraping and swallowing Rendell’s pessaries made Ginny feel worse than ever. ‘Dilys,’ she wailed, ‘I feel so sick. Please, I wanna go home.’
Before Dilys could reply, Jeannie Thompson threw the street door wide open and stood there, looking like a gorgon. ‘What the bleed’n’ hell’s going on out here?’ she bellowed.
‘We’ve come to see you, Mrs Thompson,’ Dilys explained sweetly, shoving Ginny in front of her. ‘Sorry we’re a bit late like, but me friend missed her bus, didn’t she. I’ve been waiting for her for ages and was just giving her a right telling off for leaving me standing here on me Jack.’ Dilys treated Jeannie to a charming little smile. ‘Right inconsiderate some people, ain’t they?’
The back kitchen of the house was worse than Ginny could possibly have imagined, and so was what Jeannie Thompson did to her.
During the next few weeks Ginny suffered. She suffered more than when Ted had beaten her; more than when she was lying awake at night, pretending to herself that he wasn’t off somewhere with another woman; more even than when she had lost her family in the Blitz. This time she was experiencing a new type of pain: that of knowing she was no longer carrying the child she had dreamed for years of holding in her arms. The child she had decided she could not have.
Although Dilys had been there with her on the day, and it was Dilys who had taken her to that awful woman’s house, in the end it was she, Ginny, who had made the decision that her life was in too much of a mess to bring a child into the world to share it.
And that knowledge haunted her.
The first few days after Ginny’s visit to Jeannie Thompson’s were a nightmare of physical pain: the result of the wild-haired woman’s rough and unhygienic attentions. But she was right when she told Ginny, as she had ushered her and Dilys out of her house, that a strong young girl like her would soon recover from a little bit of discomfort, as she had put it. Before long, Ginny was as fit as ever, but that wasn’t the end of it, it was only the beginning. The distress she had felt very quickly spiralled down into a dark, frightening despair, and she realised she would never be – or feel – the same again.
At least Ted wasn’t around – which, for once, was a relief – but Nellie, unfortunately, was.
In an effort to conceal what was really wrong, Ginny pretended she’d eaten something that had upset her, made her so ill, in fact, that she could hardly get out of bed, never mind go to work. But that wasn’t good enough for Nellie. Night and day she nagged her to get back to the factory, griping and groaning about her daughter-in-law’s idleness and how she, an old woman, was having to go without.
Not that she actually was going without, Pearl had seen to that, because, unlike Nellie, Pearl guessed right away what was wrong with Ginny and her heart had gone out to her.
Like so many others, Pearl had learned, with a combination of fear, guilt and overwhelming relief, of the women who would ‘help you out’ if you were in trouble. During the hard times of the 1930s, having to feed and clothe the family they already had was difficult enough for most mothers and plenty found themselves paying discreet visits to their local equivalents of Jeannie Thompson. So Pearl could just imagine what young Ginny was suffering and was glad to do whatever she could to make things a bit easier for her.
But despite their neighbour’s generosity, Nellie wasn’t satisfied with being supplied with money for food and light. No, she wanted more. She wanted money to pour down her throat at the Albert.
When Pearl had just laughed at her request for a few extra bob for a drop of something to calm her nerves, Nellie had played her usual trump. She had gone along to the pub with her empty purse and played the old soldier, trying to mump drinks from Bobby’s and Martha’s more well-oiled customers. But this time it hadn’t worked.
Nellie couldn’t understand what was going on and said so. She wished she hadn’t. It was pointed out to her, very clearly, that the reason she wasn’t exactly welcome in the Albert was all down to her precious son. Using his black-market profits as a float, Ted had widened his ‘business’ interests to include money lending. A lot of people now owed him money, many of whom could ill afford his sort of interest rates, but they were so terrified by his growing reputation for resorting to violence over the least little thing, that they found ways, desperate ways, to meet his outrageous demands. Nellie was no longer another old moaner who wasn’t particularly liked, but who was tolerated and treated to an occasional nip of the hard stuff; she had become, by association with such scum, an unwelcome ponce.
She had stormed out of the pub and back to the house, her mood fouler than ever, and even more determined to make Ginny’s life a misery.
Ginny could only be grateful that she had a friend as good as Pearl to turn to.
‘Ginny, love. You there?’ Pearl stood in the hallway, a plate covered with a tea-towel in each hand, calling up the stairs. ‘I’ve brought a bit of supper over for you and Nellie. How about coming down and seeing if you fancy it?’ She rested her broad forearm on the banister and added, ‘And don’t worry, the coast’s clear; I’ve given in and slipped Nellie a few bob to go and have a drink. Mind you, I think she’s giving the Albert a miss for some reason, she was heading for the Aberdeen according to my George.’
Ginny sat at the kitchen table, picked up her knife and fork, and stared down at the boiled bacon and pease pudding. ‘D’you mind if I eat it later, Pearl?’
‘Course not. I’ll put it in the stove with Nellie’s.’ Pearl covered the plate with an enamel dish and bent down to undo the cooker door. ‘So, how’re you feeling?’ she asked over her shoulder.
Ginny stared down into her lap and began weeping softly.
‘Don’t upset yourself, Ginny, love.’
‘You wouldn’t be so kind if you knew what I’ve done.’
Slowly Pearl closed the oven, straightened up and said quietly. ‘Don’t be daft.’
‘But I ain’t really been ill, Pearl.’ She swal
lowed hard. ‘It was all a lie. I was expecting, and I . . .’
‘I know.’
‘I couldn’t have it.’ Ginny buried her face in her hands.
‘Ssssh. There, there, darling.’ Pearl wrapped her arms round Ginny and held her close. ‘It’s all right.’
Ginny pulled away. ‘No it’s not. It’s not all right. Nothing’s all right. Not doing that, not living here with Ted . . .’ Ginny lifted her chin and looked up into Pearl’s concerned, motherly face. ‘And it’s probably not right talking about my own husband, either, but I’ve gotta tell someone.’ A shuddering sob ran through her body. ‘Pearl, Ted’s not being very good to me lately.’
Pearl bit her tongue. Not being very good? The bloke was being a first-class bastard.
‘And when I found out I was . . . you know, I tried to think how I could keep it. I tried so hard. I even thought about getting a divorce. But how could I bring up . . . Not on me own. And I couldn’t have it adopted. I couldn’t give . . . If I still had me mum, maybe I could’ve had . . .’
‘Ginny, listen, you musn’t punish yourself like this.’
‘But I—’
‘But nothing. It’s like poor Violet Varney—’
Ginny’s eyes widened with horror. ‘I’ve never done nothing like Violet did.’
‘Ssssh. Calm down, sweetheart.’ Pearl pulled out one of the chairs and sat down next to her. ‘I’m not saying you did. What I’m saying is you ain’t a criminal, you’re a bloody victim. You’ve lived a life that would have driven anyone to breaking point. But you’ve survived, and now you’ve gotta start thinking about yourself for a change, not waste any more time doing what other people tell you. Throw the sodding monkeys off your back; stop letting them push you this way and then shoving you back the other. You’re a grown woman, Ginny, not a servant or a kid to be ordered about.’
Ginny blew her nose noisily as her tears began to flow again. ‘It’s easy for you, Pearl, you’re lucky, you’re strong and you’ve got your family round you, and . . . and, what have I got?’
Dream On Page 12