‘But not enough to keep us in work after today, I suspect,’ he couldn’t resist saying.
‘That’s not his fault,’ she chided him. ‘If the work’s not there, he can’t afford to pay his men. You can surely see the sense in that.’
‘Oh, I see the sense in it all right. It don’t help to put food in the family’s bellies though, does it?’
He was horrified at his own blundering crudity. Miss Nora Woolley was a fine young woman, far more educated than himself, and his clumsy words would probably make her regret ever agreeing to be seen in this public place with him. He avoided looking at her for a moment, not wanting to see the annoyance in her eyes.
‘Poor Wilf,’ he heard her say softly. ‘But truly, I do understand. Would you like me to ask Father if there’s any other work available?’
He looked at her quickly. Her eyes were as expressive as his sister Carrie’s, and filled with sympathy now. Her mouth was soft, and he felt his heartbeats quicken. She was obviously sincere, but he’d be damned if he’d allow a woman to beg for him. He had far too much pride for that.
‘That’s not necessary,’ he said, more easily than he felt. ‘Besides, I’ve got a couple of things in mind.’
‘Then I’m sorry,’ she said contritely. ‘I can see that I’ve offended you, and I didn’t mean to do so.’
The arrival of the waitress with the tray of tea and cakes, prevented him from answering immediately, and he waited while the girl poured out the tea for them both, and left them the plate of cakes for their selection.
‘You choose first,’ Wilf said, and was oddly pleased when she chose a cream-filled pastry. He had no patience with girls who ate like sparrows. He chose his favourite ginger cake, and bit into it hungrily. A day spent more idly than normally by the river had certainly sharpened his appetite.
‘You haven’t offended me,’ he said at last. ‘It’s just that after working on the Great Britain and helping to get her ship-shape, anything else is going to seem like a let-down. In a way, we’ve all been a part of her, no matter how menial a task we’ve been doing, and I need to rearrange my thoughts before I decide what to do next.’
‘Yes, I can see that, Wilf.’
‘Can you? Then you don’t think I’m being noddle-headed to be talking so possessively about a ship?’
He began to relax, and he grinned at his own words. Miss Nora Woolley smiled back, and if Wilf had believed in such things, he’d have said he was halfway to being bewitched by that smile.
‘I don’t think you’re noddle-headed at all,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen you around the wharf, and I’ve always thought —’
She stopped, and at the blush in her cheeks, Wilf thought he’d never seen such a delicate shade of pink. It emboldened him to lean forward a little.
‘What did you think, Nora?’ He said her name for the first time, and saw her smile widen. Little teasing lights seemed to dance in her eyes, and he was already half in love with her.
‘I’m not going to tell you,’ she said gaily. ‘It will only make you swollen-headed.’
‘Well, at least that would be an improvement on being noddle-headed, wouldn’t it?’ he teased back.
Amazed, he felt as if he was standing back from himself, and watching this suddenly confident Wilf Stuckey enjoying the company of a young lady, and able to find the words that seemed to amuse her.
‘But you’ve noticed me then?’ he persisted.
And he had noticed her … with all the humility of a mere human worshipping a goddess from afar. Yet it had never been in his nature to be humble, except where Miss Nora Woolley had been concerned, and his feelings had been far too private to tell anyone about them. But the fact that fate — and her father — had pushed them together, was nothing short of spectacular, and was making him extra bold.
Nora laughed, her eyes sparkling. Impulsively, she reached across the table and covered his hand with her own for a moment.
‘Oh Wilf, you’re so funny. How could anyone miss you, when you stand head and shoulders above all the rest of them in Father’s employ? And I don’t just mean physically, either.’
Aware that she’d said far more than a young lady should, she withdrew her hand at once, and lowered her eyes from the sudden hot gaze she glimpsed in Wilf Stuckey’s eyes.
But not before someone else, on her roundabout way from Clifton, down Park Street to the city, had seen the way the two of them had seemed to lean towards one another so lovingly in the window seat of the tea-room, and the intimate way the girl had pressed Wilf’s hand. For Elsie Miller, it was the biggest, and most disagreeable shock of the day, and needed considerable thought.
Chapter 4
The trouble with Elsie was that she never gave considerable thought to anything. Rushing straight into trouble, like a bull in a china shop, was the way Carrie frequently described her. Carrie was the sensible one, the caring one, while Elsie courted trouble like other girls courted their beaus.
She scowled as the thought came into her mind. Because the thing most troublesome to her right now, was that Wilf Stuckey had obviously found a belle of his own, and it wasn’t her. Not that he’d ever given her cause to think he was remotely interested … but Elsie had a way of dismissing such trivialities.
She hardly noticed how she was jostled about in the crowds that still lingered in the city, as if reluctant to put this wonderful day behind them. For Elsie, the day had already gone sour, and she wondered resentfully what her friend Carrie was doing now. She’d still be up on Clifton Downs, Elsie guessed, and probably hoping to hob-nob with some of the posh young ladies like that Helen Barclay.
Elsie scowled, knowing that for all her own brash self-assurance, Carrie had an inborn kind of dignity that made the Helen Barclays of the world quite ready to stop and talk and exchange pleasantries. Carrie might be poor, but she would never be common …
‘Elsie, I want me tea!’
She heard her granpa bawling out his instructions the minute she’d crashed the door behind her. She bawled back.
‘Give me a minute to get me hat off, can’t you? I ain’t steam-driven!’
‘You’ve been gone all day, and I ain’t seen nobody. I mighta died here all alone.’
She mimed the well-used words as he spoke, and went into the room where he ate and slept, wrinkling her nose at the undoubted smells of old age and stale urine. He couldn’t help himself, but nor could she help being affronted by it.
‘Well, you ain’t dead, are you? So what do you want for your tea? There’s bread and dripping and a bit of seed cake left.’
‘That’ll do,’ he said, beginning to whine. ‘Just so long as you stay and keep me company, girl.’
She gritted her teeth and went to get the food. She could never eat in the same room as him, because of the smells, and by the time she got her own meal, the smells seemed to be a part of her, so she couldn’t eat much anyway. But she supposed it was one way of keeping thin. Besides, she didn’t feel like food now. She hacked at the bread viciously, remembering the fair-haired girl leaning so prettily towards Wilf Stuckey, and wished she was hacking through those golden curls instead.
In the darkness of her box-like bedroom, trying to ignore her granpa’s wheezing snores in the room next door she was able to transport herself and her surroundings into one glorious romp with Wilf. She’d imagined his arms holding her so often, and his eyes darkening as they looked deep into hers, that it had come a brutal shock to see him gazing into that prissy fair-haired girl’s eyes in the Park Street tea-room.
She couldn’t think yet what she was going to do with the information. One side of her told her to forget it, and then it simply wouldn’t exist. But the darker side of her wanted to punish Wilf, just for wanting that fancy tart, instead of wanting her.
* * *
Wilf whistled jauntily as he strode home an hour later. By then, he’d escorted Miss Nora Woolley to the house in Ashton Way where she lived with her father, and tried not to gulp at the size of it. A h
ouse like this should put a girl like Nora well out of his reach, but she hadn’t seemed to think so. He was astute enough to know that the feelings stirring inside him for her, were being returned.
It was the first time he’d seriously thought about his future with regard to a girl. He was only twenty years old, and his Pa had instilled in all of them that a man wasn’t properly ready for marriage and settling down until he was nearing thirty. But a couple of hours in the company of a certain young lady had changed all those ideas.
Even though the dreams were foolish, and Aaron Woolley would undoubtedly want something better for his daughter than marriage to a woodworking man, Wilf wasn’t ready to let go of his dreams just yet.
He met up with his brother Frank just before he reached the bottom of Jacob’s Wells Road. Frank was lounging about with some of the foreign sailors from one of the trading vessels in the docks, and no doubt having his head filled with tales of exotic foreign places as usual. Frank excused himself from the group as soon as he saw Wilf, and fell into step alongside him. Their boots rang and sparked on the cobbles as the two of them began the walk up the steep hill towards home.
‘Well? How did it go, bruth? Did she give you any encouragement?’ Frank said cheekily.
‘I didn’t go with her for that. It was Gaffer’s idea, you know that.’
‘I know you’ve had your eye on her for some weeks past,’ Frank said slyly. ‘Every time she brought Gaffer’s tucker down to the wharf, your eyes nearly popped out of your head. You might fool a lot of people with your icy looks, Wilf, but I know you too well.’
Wilf gave a short laugh, and his powerful shoulders relaxed. ‘I guess you do. All right then. We had some tea and cakes in Park Street, and then I took her home. That’s all there was to it. Have you ever seen Woolley’s place?’
‘I’d rather hear about the girl. Did she give you the glad eye after all that soft-soaping?’
‘Maybe.’ He refused to give an inch, and Frank gave an irritated sigh.
‘You can be as close as a bloody clam when it suits you, our Wilf. Anyway, a certain somebody will have her nose put out of joint if you start courting the Woolley girl, so there may be a chance for me yet.’
Wilf looked at him blankly. His mind was too full of Nora Woolley to think of anything else, and it was only when Carrie came out of the front door of their own house that he realised what Frank meant.
‘Have either of you seen Elsie? She was working up to a fine old stew when I left her on the Downs, and I wanted to make my peace with her.’
‘The less I see of that baggage, the better,’ Wilf muttered, ‘and I’d advise you to think the same way, Frank. She’s nothing but trouble.’
Carrie was near enough to hear his words, and sprang to her friend’s defence as usual.
‘I wish you wouldn’t always be so mean to her, Wilf,’ she snapped. ‘She thinks a lot of you —’
‘Oh ah, me and half the boyos who come over on the Welsh trows every Wednesday.’ He was brasher than usual because of his own conquest that afternoon. ‘If our Elsie ain’t tried ’em all by night-time, she’ll be thinking there’s summat wrong with her.’
Carrie gasped with fury. ‘That’s a horrible thing to say, Wilf, and it’s not true. Elsie’s a very friendly girl, that’s all, and you’re not to imply that she does anything more than chat to the fellows.’
She turned on her heel to go back indoors, when her mother came hurrying down from the top of the street, annoyed at finding her children squabbling on the doorstep, and flustered and upset at her afternoon’s visit.
‘I’d make you all get indoors and stop disgracing us, if there weren’t more important things to do. Carrie, you’re to go for the doctor for poor Mrs Dewhurst. He can’t do nothing, as she’s just passed away, but I’m not prepared to do the laying-out until he gives me his say-so. She’s always paid up her weekly penny for his services, so she has a right to him seeing her out.’
There was also the fact of the doctor seeing that Ma got paid for her laying-out from the weekly fund, but this was hardly the time to mention it.
She turned to her second son. ‘Frank, you go and see if you can find that boy of hers. He’ll not be overly concerned, but it’s his business, and I’ll not be responsible for her send-off without him making the arrangements. And Wilf, you stay here with our Billy while I go back with Mrs Dewhurst until somebody comes. I doubt that your Pa’s home yet, and if he is, he’ll hardly be sensible.’
They listened to her crisp words, and didn’t fail to note the derision in her last comment. Pa would be roaring drunk by the end of the night, and waking tomorrow with a gale-force headache. Ma was calm, sensible, and completely in charge — and they all knew they’d get the rasp of her tongue if they didn’t comply exactly with her wishes.
The three of them scattered, while she toiled back up the hill to the dead woman’s cottage once more. They all knew the unpleasant fact that there were several others in the vicinity willing to be paid for the unsavoury task of laying-out, and Ma needed to guard her old lady until the doctor authorised her task.
Carrie followed up the hill, her feet skimming over the cobblestones, to where the doctor’s house stood at the edge of the Clifton mansions. She had to pause to catch her breath before she could go inside, and it was while she was leaning on the gatepost with her hand over the painful stitch in her side, that she saw a familiar figure coming down the hill towards her.
‘Are you ill, Carrie?’ John Travis said, seeing the way her face was flushed, and how heavily she leaned on the gatepost of the doctor’s house.
He moved forward at once and put his arm around her. It was done purely as a gesture of concern for a fellow human being. But the contact was so warm, and his appearance so unforeseen, that she was very tempted to lean against him, and feign an illness she didn’t have, simply for the joy of being so unexpectedly in his arms.
‘Catch your breath before you say anything,’ John instructed, hearing her ragged breathing. ‘You probably ran too quickly up the hill.’
‘No, it’s not that.’
To her own annoyance, she felt obliged not to let him go on thinking she was sick, even though her heart was racing twice as fast as normal. Elsie would have relished this kind of situation, Carrie thought, but she herself was too honest to let it continue.
‘I’m not here for the doctor on my own account. An old lady along the road from us has died, and Ma needs the doctor to come to her before she sees to the laying-out.’
She bit her lip, aware of how plain and ordinary they sounded. Her Ma did the laying-out as an extra bit of income, doing all the worst tasks one human being could do for another, and doing it with compassion. She felt a fierce love and respect for her Ma, but all the same, it shamed her to speak of such things to a man like John Travis.
‘Would you like me to come in with you? You look very hot and bothered, and maybe the doctor would want to take a look at you.’
‘You can come if you like,’ she mumbled. ‘I only have to inform him that Mrs Dewhurst’s dead, and ask him to come straight away.’
Oh, why couldn’t she be coquettish like Elsie, when this nice young man was looking at her with such concern? Why couldn’t she lower her eyes and brush his hand with her finger-tips the way she’d seen Elsie do it, and give an unspoken invitation that she liked him enormously? But she didn’t have Elsie’s flair and never could have.
‘I’ll wait for you,’ John said decisively. ‘Our paths seem destined to cross today, so it would be going against fate if I left you here now, wouldn’t it? Or don’t you believe in fate?’
She guessed he was talking to keep her from remembering the reason she was here, and the gruesome task her Ma had to perform, but she managed a brief smile at his words, as they pushed open the garden gate and walked together up the long pathway to the doctor’s front door.
‘I suppose everybody believes in fate, though I think people make up their own minds what they do with it.’<
br />
‘That’s a very perceptive thought,’ he said, and although she wasn’t sure what perceptive meant, it was obviously something good, because of the admiring way he said it. But all thoughts of self-esteem went out of her head as the door of the doctor’s house opened, and the crusty medical man stood there.
‘What is it, Carrie? Has young Billy crashed his head into a wall again?’
‘No. I’ve come about Mrs Dewhurst, Doctor Flowers. Ma says she’s dead, so can you please come at once?’
He gave a snort. ‘Trust somebody to break up my dinner party. Well, it can’t be helped. Tell your mother I’ll be there in half an hour, and that she can go ahead. She’s a trustworthy woman and has a skill with these things. You’ll maybe take up the job yourself one day, Carrie,’ he added, with an attempt at joviality.
‘I will not!’ she said, shuddering, remembering the smells that lingered on her mother’s hands after such a job.
The doctor laughed, and she squirmed, presuming that being so used to life and death and everything in between, must make you this insensitive. The doctor suddenly looked more keenly at her companion.
‘It’s young Travis from Bedminster Hill, isn’t it? How does your uncle fare these days?’
‘He’s very well, sir. I’ll tell him you were asking after him.’
It was obvious to Carrie that the doctor held John and his uncle in some regard, and she felt doubly awkward at why she was here. But she kept her head high as they left the house while the doctor went to make his apologies to his dinner guests, and Carrie didn’t attempt to break the small silence between them.
‘You shouldn’t take Doctor Flowers’ brusqueness to heart,’ John said at last. ‘When you’re dealing every day with sickness and death, you have to keep a hard shell around you.’
‘I know. A doctor has to be impersonal, but it can’t be so easy when it’s a relative, can it?’ She had never had to face death in a relative or friend yet, but it was something that Elsie was going to have to do sooner or later. She and her old granpa constantly scraped one another up the wrong way, but they were a family, all the same.
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