by Marie Joseph
‘Stop it!’ Jonathan looked as if he was about to hit her. ‘Stop play-acting!’ He winced as he saw the tears gather in her eyes. ‘It gets on my nerves,’ he added, bending down and starting to dismantle the bed. ‘You’ve known me too long to need to put on an act with me. And wipe your nose, it’s running.’
With grim determination he went on with what he was doing, ignoring the snuffling sounds behind him. When he turned round at last Lisa was white-faced, composed and silent, but as if she had spoken Jonathan rounded on her.
‘And don’t you dare say how good it is of my father to do what he’s doing! Your mother’s been at the bottle, hasn’t she? So let’s have a bit of truth coming out in this whole rotten mess!’ Anger took over from distress as Jonathan freed the bedpost from the base, which fell with a clatter to the floor. ‘It was your father who began all this with his pretending to live like a lord when all the time he wasn’t worth a brass farthing.’ He ran his fingers through his dark hair, leaving a dirty mark on his forehead. Oh, God, what was he saying? Why didn’t he keep his mouth shut? That was what his father had told him to do. Merely to help with the removal, then scarper.
He began to dismantle the second bed-end, twisting the spanner with angry jerks, banging when the nut wouldn’t shift, releasing his fury at what he couldn’t bear to accept, hearing Lisa snivelling behind him, whimpering like some small animal in pain.
‘You don’t still believe your father might come back?’ Jonathan struggled with the rusty bolt, feeling the sweat break out on his dirty forehead. ‘You don’t, do you? You wouldn’t be that daft.’
With a final twist the spanner did its job. As he straightened up Lisa came round the opposite side of the bed, ready to lift and guide the unwieldy frame through the door.
‘My father is dead,’ she said in a light conversational tone. ‘He died about a month ago. Abroad.’
Jonathan stared through the wire mesh at a tear-stained face framed by two long, thick plaits, a face at that moment as plain as the back of a fishcart.
‘When we’ve got settled in, Jonathan Grey, I’ll find a job. My mother hasn’t been eating properly, so I must see she has good, nourishing food. There are lots of ways to make money if you put your mind to it. We won’t be living in Mill Street for long, you’ll see.’ She gave a small smile. ‘Now, do you want me to lift or push? I’m stronger than I look, so don’t worry.’
Jonathan gave up. Suddenly all his anger was spent. ‘I’ve got a bloke outside in the van.’ He walked over to the window, throwing up the sash. ‘I’ll give him a shout. I’d have brought him in at first but I thought we might’ve had a sensible talk.’ He leaned out. ‘Bill? Up here!’
He nodded at Lisa. ‘Just give me that list and we’ll get on with it. OK?’
As she passed over the slip of paper their fingers touched, and immediately the sadness he had felt ever since stepping into the big house came up in his throat. Gripping Lisa’s hand tightly he whispered, ‘Your father. What did he die of, Lisa Logan? C’mon now. The truth!’
Pulling her hand away, she met his eyes and said, lying through her small white teeth, ‘Of a fever.’ Then, turning on her heel, she walked out on to the landing, throwing her plaits over her shoulders as she went.
‘In there,’ he heard her tell the tall, shock-haired youth bounding up the stairs. ‘Mr Grey knows what to do.’
Jonathan balled a hand into a fist and beat his forehead. What was the use? In all the sorry, stupid mess, what was the use?
‘Beds first,’ he told the boy entering the room. ‘And if the other one is anything like this to dismantle, then it’s a bugger.’
The house in Mill Street, two up and two down, had a front door which opened directly into a front room smelling of the possibility of mice. The room at the back overlooked a tiny yard with a lean-to coal shed and a lavatory with a stained wooden seat.
Beneath the window of the back room was a slopstone with a cold tap, and in the grate of an old-fashioned black fireplace a tiny fire burned. The oilcloth covering the floor was so thin and worn that the nicks of the flags underneath showed clearly, making a separate pattern of their own.
At seven o’clock that same evening Delia sat in a chair, smoking and flicking ash into the hearth. They had eaten a snatched meal of bread and jam, and now Lisa was standing at the gas cooker waiting for the kettle to boil.
‘We were lucky there was some coal in the shed, weren’t we?’ She picked up a dishcloth and poured a stream of boiling water into a teapot. ‘You’ll feel better when you’ve had a cup of tea.’
Delia said nothing. Lisa bit her lips tightly together to hide her exasperation. She kept on reminding herself of how her mother had looked just a few short months ago. Then, to get her own way, Delia had only needed to flutter her eyelashes and pout. Now there was no one to flutter her eyelashes at, the friends they had danced their nights away with having disappeared like snow in the sun.
‘When the sale of the house goes through things will be different.’ Lisa passed Delia a cup of tea. ‘This is only for the time being.’ She sat down across the fireplace from her mother. ‘You know what they say about the darkest hour always coming before the dawn.’
‘There won’t be a dawn.’ Delia stared morosely into the tiny fire. ‘I’ve given instructions to that fool of a solicitor that the money has to go to pay off your father’s debts. From what he says there’ll still be some owing even when we’re totally destitute.’
‘People would wait.’ Lisa felt the ache in her back spread to her legs. ‘People aren’t that unkind.’
Delia clattered her cup back on to her saucer. ‘Aren’t they? Bookies have hearts of gold then, have they? Patrick Grey has let us have this hovel out of the goodness of his heart, has he?’ She threw the cigarette stub into the fire. ‘He’s the one we’re going to pay back first. We’re going to get a rent book and we’re going to pay him every penny, week by week.’
‘Seven shillings.’ Lisa nodded. ‘That’s what the rent is. I asked Jonathan and he told me.’ Leaning forward, she picked up the poker and stirred the fire into sluggish life. ‘In the morning I’m going to sign on at the Labour Exchange. They might have a job for me. I’m not trained for anything, but I’m going to go to Night School to learn shorthand and typing. It’s free, and if I work at – well, anything during the day, then get good speeds at Night School, leaving school won’t have mattered.’ She smiled hopefully at Delia. ‘You never know, maybe you’ll decide to find a job, when you’re feeling better. In a dress shop or something.’ She glanced round the bleak little room. ‘It would be better than staying in here all day.’
With fingers that shook, Delia scrabbled for another cigarette, lighting it with a feverish intensity as if she couldn’t trust herself to speak before she had drawn smoke deep into her lungs. Always quick to lose her temper, since Angus had gone her cold and terrible rages had increased to a point where it seemed every vestige of control had been abandoned.
‘You sit there,’ she told her daughter through tight lips, ‘calmly suggesting that I go out to work? In a dress shop serving women who used to be my friends? God, but you take the biscuit!’ She puffed frantically. ‘I’ve done nothing to deserve this! Do you hear me? That bastard you call your father may have driven us to live in surroundings not fit for pigs, but he’s not forcing me out to earn my living. You’re like him. Do you know that?’ She tilted her small head away from the upcurl of smoke, looking at Lisa from beneath hooded lids. ‘And just who do you think is going to employ you? Have you taken a good look at yourself lately? Look at your hands! And your hair! You look like a skivvy and you talk like one. You disgust me!’
The hurt deep inside Lisa was like a grinding pain. It was true that since taking on the housework back at The Laurels her hands had roughened and reddened. It was also true that at times her hair stayed plaited for days. But it wasn’t her fault. None of the whole rotten mess they were in was her fault. She was tired to the point of exhaustio
n; she was hungry and unhappy; and there were moments when she accepted in her heart that her father would never be coming back. Suddenly he was there, in her imagination, striding into the dreadful little room, blue eyes dancing, tweaking her plaits and calling her his bonny wee lass. The pain of his going stabbed her afresh.
‘I can do something about my hair!’ She jumped up and walked over to the kitchen dresser which filled the whole of one wall. ‘That’s if I remembered to bring the scissors.’
Opening a drawer, she pounced on them, waving them aloft.
She was all her father as she hacked first at one plait then the other. With a dramatic flourish she flung them into the fire, hearing them sizzle as the flames took and consumed them, seeing the sparks fly against the sooty chimney back.
‘There!’ she shouted in triumph. ‘That’s one problem solved! Now do you think I look fit to sign on at the Labour Exchange? Well?’
‘You young devil!’ Jumping up from her chair Delia was white with shock. ‘You knew I didn’t mean you to do that! How dare you take me up, just for spite?’ Hysteria sharpened her high voice as she reached for the scissors. ‘Here, give them to me! Let me have a go at mine, then we can both look the part!’
She was shouting so loudly that neither of them heard the knock on the door. Whipping round, their faces blank with astonishment, mother and daughter stared in disbelief at the stout bulk of the woman standing in the doorway, holding a basin in her hands.
‘I’m Mrs Ellis.’ Two chins wobbled into a smile. ‘Next door. Yon side.’ A head waved into ridges by steel kirby-grips jerked towards the dresser. ‘I saw you come at dinner time, but I thowt I’d let you settle first before I come round to see if there was owt I could do.’
‘Without knocking!’ Delia was beside herself. ‘You come straight into my house, walking into my drawing-room without even being announced?’ Her eyes flicked up and down over the stout little body, from the tortuously pinned hair to the broad feet encased in down-at-heel bedroom slippers. Frustration and despair now unleashed Delia’s ungovernable temper into a fury. She sat down again, speaking fretfully to Lisa. ‘Do you know this person, Lisa? Because she’s a stranger to me.’
Florence Ellis had lost a husband on the Somme. She had struggled to bring up two children by going out daily, cleaning in the big houses up by the park. She had known humiliation, hunger at times; she had worked for women who treated her as less than the dust beneath their feet. But never in the whole of her life had she been spoken to like that.
‘Eh on now!’ She drew herself up to her full height of four feet eleven inches. ‘There’s no call to talk like that. I did knock, if you must know, but you was yelling that loud it was no wonder you didn’t hear.’ Her voice softened. ‘C’mon now, luv. I know what it’s like when you’ve just flitted, and as we’re to be next-door neighbours we don’t want to start off wrong.’ She winked at Delia’s strained face. ‘I’ve got two lasses a bit older than what your lass is, so I know what it’s like. Think they know everything when they know nowt.’ She placed the covered basin on the table. ‘I don’t suppose either of you’s had more than a jam butty all day, so there’s a drop of stew there. It only needs warming up.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Ellis.’ Lisa was so ashamed of her mother that she could hardly bear to look at her. ‘You’re very kind.’
To Lisa’s dismay Delia waved an imperious hand at the basin. ‘You can take that … that dish away with you. And you can go. Now!’ Ignoring the stricken look on Lisa’s face, she turned a shoulder and stared into the fire. ‘Show this person out, Lisa. When I need charity I will ask for it. But not until.’
Lisa looked as if she were about to cry, but Mrs Ellis picked up the basin and advanced on Delia as if she were about to pour the contents over her head. Her body seemed to swell. ‘Right, Mrs Fancy-pants. You’ve picked the wrong one to talk to like that! You think you’re better than what I am, don’t you? Well, let me tell thee summat. I do what’s right, like most of the folks down this street, and that makes me thy equal.’ She advanced a step nearer to where Delia sat, apparently unhearing. ‘I wasn’t going to say, but I know who you are, aye, and I know what’s brought you low, an’ so does everybody else round abouts. An’ folks was sorry for you. Right heart sorry. There’s more kindness in this street than I reckon tha’s known in a month of Sundays. Want for owt in this street and a stretched-out hand will be filled.’ She nodded her large, almost square face. ‘But I reckon tha’ll have to shout mighty loud afore anybody comes running!’
Clutching the basin to her one-piece bosom, she stalked majestically to the door, her slippers making little slapping noises on the worn oilcloth.
‘My mother isn’t very well.’ Lisa followed her, still clutching the kitchen scissors. ‘She didn’t mean to be rude.’
‘Oh, aye?’ Mrs Ellis sniffed. ‘Well, I did.’ She stood on the flags looking up and down the sloping street. ‘Talking with a posh voice doesn’t give folks the right to be insulting. Not in my book it doesn’t.’
When Lisa went back through the front parlour into the living-room Delia was rummaging in her handbag for lipstick and mirror.
‘We must keep up appearances,’ she said. ‘That’s very important.’ And holding up the mirror in the lid of a gold compact she drew a perfect cupid’s bow across her thin lips, pressing them together, then fluffed up her end-frizzed hair before lighting another cigarette.
With a little cry Lisa turned and ran up the uncarpeted stairs into the bedroom at the back of the house. Throwing herself down on the bed which Jonathan had put up that morning she pulled the counterpane round her for comfort. Normally, when upset, she had retired behind her hair, drawing it over her face like a blanket, but now even that was gone. Without the long thick fall of hair she felt strangely bereft, as if, like Samson, she told herself dramatically, losing it had drained away all her strength. In spite of Patrick Grey’s insistence that the house be stoved to get rid of the bugs before they moved in, a strange, sweet, sickly smell came from the walls. Outside the window were not fields and the distant view of a leafy wood, but rows of dreary terraced houses, with grey washing flapping against soot-ingrained walls.
She was a very young fifteen-year-old. She felt ugly, and she was cold. There was no food in the house, and downstairs her mother was sitting hunched up over the fire with her thin lips painted a bright red. Back at The Laurels there were little labels stuck on Lisa’s frilled dressing-table and the pink velvet chair in her bedroom. Soon dealers with catalogues would be walking round the lovely house, making bids for everything, and when the money came in it would all have to go to faceless men in loud check suits with cigars stuck into their greedy vacant faces.
Her mother was never going to accept that her life had changed for ever. Lisa knew in her heart that Delia was determined to carry on as if she were still Mrs Angus Logan of The Laurels, with a cook in the kitchen and a daily woman to do the cleaning. The way her mother had spoken to that kind little woman from next door had shown Lisa exactly how it was going to be.
There was a wild streak in Delia that positively frightened Lisa. At times it took the form of a screaming vulgarity she couldn’t understand. In Lisa’s opinion, for what it was worth, she told herself, there were times when her mother’s behaviour made nonsense of her claim to middle-class refinement.
She laid an arm across her eyes… . Somewhere, thousands of miles away, her father sat beneath a foreign sun by the side of a woman dripping with diamonds. With the clarity of her over-vivid imagination, Lisa could see a plump hand weighted with rings, reaching out to pat her father’s knee.
I wonder if she’s persuaded him into shorter shorts, she wondered, and the wondering brought scalding tears to her eyes.
Lisa was his only child – his bonny wee lass, Angus had often called her – and yet he had walked away. It was unbelievable, incredible, and yet it was so.
As her crying shuddered to soft hiccuping sobs, she sank into sleep, too weary to u
ndress, too unhappy even to care.
‘How can you stand there and tell me that you intend queueing at the Labour Exchange with a line of common people?’ Delia lifted a fluted cup rimmed with gold leaf to her scarlet mouth. ‘I’m sure that one of your father’s so-called friends would take you as his secretary if you’re really determined to give up your schooling and go out to business. You seem to have made up your mind to upset me. Isn’t there some way you can claim some money from the government? Like the dole or something,’ she added vaguely.
Lisa looked away from her mother’s puffy early-morning face. She told herself that it was important she kept calm.
‘Secretaries do shorthand and typing, Mother, and I can’t do either.’ She smiled, willing Delia to smile back. ‘Come to think of it, there’s not much I can do really. I can play the piano a little, speak a sort of schoolgirl French, ride a horse, boil an egg if I stand with a watch in my hand, and that’s about it. I can’t see anyone rushing to employ me, but I have to try.’ She stood up and crammed a yellow beret down over the chewed and ragged hair. ‘I have to try, Mother. We have to eat.’
Delia lit a cigarette. ‘Well, I suppose if you must, then you must.’ She opened her handbag and took out a ten-shilling note. ‘Bring me some cigarettes on your way back, dear. And not those awful Woodbines, please! And perhaps a pot or two of those buttered shrimps from the market ladies. It is Wednesday, isn’t it?’ She put a hand to her forehead. ‘It’s funny, but I get the impression that every day is Monday lately, somehow. Monday, Monday, Monday. One after the other.’
‘Is this all we have?’ Lisa frowned at the note, her small face anxious and drawn beneath the felt beret. ‘Mother. Is it?’
‘Oh, my God, the fire’s going out!’ Delia pointed an accusing finger at the black grate. ‘See to it before you go, Lisa. You’re a Girl Guide. You know how to keep a fire going.’
‘I was a Girl Guide,’ Lisa corrected. ‘My uniform is wrapped up in a bundle back at the house, remember? Lot 96 or something.’ Kneeling down, she inserted the poker beneath the small pyramid of sticks and coal, regretting her words immediately, as Delia sprang from her chair in a fury.