‘You learn to face it,’ John said, and from his voice she knew at once that he had already done so. She was embarrassed that such intimate feelings had somehow come to the surface between them when they hardly knew one another.
A group of urchins came hurtling towards them and they were forced to part for a moment to let them through, and then John held on to her arm firmly.
‘I don’t want to lose you already,’ he commented. ‘I hadn’t expected to see you again so soon, but this has got to be fate. We saw each other on the Downs this afternoon, and now again.’
‘Oh yes, you were with your friends,’ she said, as if only just remembering, when in fact she felt she could recall every face of the laughing, confident crowd he had been with.
‘Hardly my friends,’ he grinned. ‘They were merely paying clients who wanted a guided tour of the city. After their pleasure cruise tomorrow, they’ll be returning to Oxford, and I doubt that I’ll ever see them again.’
‘Oh, I see,’ Carrie said, trying not to sound too pleased at the explanation.
The road had become very congested with people making their way back up from the waterfront, or moving down towards it. Carrie was glad of the crowds as they passed Mrs Dewhurst’s cottage. She thought of the poor old dab inside it, with her Ma keeping a quiet vigil alongside her, and shivered again. Suddenly she wanted to be indoors, where everything was safe and secure and familiar, and she told John quickly that she had better walk the last part alone, lest her Pa was keeping an eye out for her.
‘Would he object to your walking out with a boy then?’ he asked teasingly.
‘He might,’ she said, flustered. ‘But we’re not walking out, are we?’
The crowds divided them again, and she had no idea what he might have answered. But she was within reach of her own front door now, and she almost flew inside it, slamming it fast behind her.
* * *
‘Where’s the fire?’ Wilf said mildly.
‘Our Carrie’s afraid of ghosts, afraid of ghosts,’ Billy began to chant. ‘She’s afraid old Mrs Dewhurst’s ghost is going to get her.’
‘Don’t be so daft,’ Carrie snapped. ‘And don’t be so disrespectful, neither. If you don’t shut up and behave yourself, I won’t cook your tea, and you’ll be going to bed without any.’
He scowled. ‘Why are you in such a bad mood? I like Elsie better than you now. She gives me sweets from the market.’
That’s because Elsie doesn’t pay for them, Carrie said silently beneath her breath.
‘I’m not in a bad mood,’ she said, trying to lighten the atmosphere in the house. Wilf seemed to be a dreamworld of his own, probably worrying about finding work, she thought guiltily, and here she was, snapping and snarling at Billy for the thinnest of reasons.
‘Do I have to eat my carrots then?’ he said hopefully, recognising the glimmer of guilt with all the cunning of a fox-cub.
‘Just a few,’ she compromised, knowing how he hated them. ‘If we have our pie and vegetables before Ma gets back, she won’t know if you haven’t had many, will she? But you’re not to tell her, mind.’
He practised the wink he couldn’t quite manage. ‘That’s two things we don’t have to tell her, then.’
Carrie felt her blood freeze for a second, before it surged through her veins.
‘What’s the other thing?’ Wilf said lazily.
‘It’s the sweets Elsie keeps giving him from the market,’ Carrie said quickly. ‘You know Ma don’t like him eating too many, or he gets the belly-ache.’
And before Billy could open his mouth to say that was three things he didn’t have to tell Ma, she bundled him over to the sideboard and instructed him to put the knives and forks on the table for the meal.
Not that Ma would want any, Carrie thought. She never had the stomach for it after a laying-out. And Pa would be too full of beer to eat, and spend the night belching and snoring and keeping the rest of them awake. Wilf seemed preoccupied, and she didn’t really feel like food. That left only Frank and Billy, who never lost their appetities, and probably never would, whatever disaster befell them.
It didn’t matter. Whatever didn’t get eaten today would be served up tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, until it was gone. They couldn’t afford to waste food, especially now that the men’s jobs on the Great Britain had finished. Once the vegetables were simmering on the hob, and the pie browning nicely in the oven, she glanced at her oldest brother.
‘What will you do tomorrow, Wilf? Does Gaffer Woolley have anything to offer you?’
Wilf’s head was full of Gaffer Woolley’s daughter at that moment, and he shook his head.
‘I ain’t asked him yet. Tomorrow will be soon enough.’
He was more abrupt than usual, remembering how Miss Nora Woolley had said she’d put in a good word for him with her father, if he liked. He hadn’t liked. It was a man’s duty to find his own work, and not have a woman doing it for him.
Carrie saw his tight lips, and didn’t pursue the question, though she thought that tomorrow was long overdue for finding new jobs. She sometimes thought her menfolk buried their heads too deep in the sand, believing in their own craftsmanship, and thinking the work would come to them. It didn’t happen that way as she and Ma knew only too well.
Once long ago, when jobs were scarce and they’d been barely surviving, her Ma had walked the Clifton streets asking for work, taking the then tiny Carrie with her. It had been the beginning of the work for which Ma prided herself now, the laundering of the fine silks and laces of the rich Clifton folk. But it had all begun by literally walking the streets and knocking on doors, and almost begging for work.
Perhaps a woman was better suited to beg, Carrie thought now, or more prepared to lose face for her family’s survival. A man had too much pride, while a woman was prepared to sink her pride when needs demanded it, knowing that it could always be restored. They called men the superior sex, but sometimes she wondered.
‘Do I have a smut on my nose or something?’ Wilf asked, and she realised how intently she had been staring, without really seeing him at all.
‘I was only thinking,’ she said lightly.
‘You don’t want to do too much of that. Too much thinking in a woman stretches the brain.’
‘How does too much thinking stretch the brain?’ Billy said curiously, before she could draw enough breath to explode at Wilf’s remark. ‘Will it bulge out of our Carrie’s head if she thinks too much?’
Carrie laughed. ‘Of course it won’t, you goose. And Wilf shouldn’t say such daft things.’
It said a lot about the way he thought of her, though, she thought uneasily. He, and Frank, and especially Pa. They didn’t really like their womenfolk to think too much. They wanted all the thinking in the household to be left to the men. But none of them had been canny enough to see that they should have got tomorrow’s jobs sorted out long before now, when they’d be just a handful of carpenters looking for work in a city full of men as skilled as themselves.
* * *
A week later it was obvious that there were few jobs to be had for men preferring to work together as a team if they could. It was also obvious they should have seen this work shortage coming, and not relied on the good nature of Gaffer Woolley to find them something. Gaffer Woolley was hard-pressed to pay the wages of the men he still had on his books, without finding jobs that didn’t exist for the rest.
‘What are we, if we ain’t been loyal workers all these months?’ Pa scowled, after another fruitless walk around the city looking for work. ‘They want us quick enough when they need an urgent job done, and they’m just as quick to lay us off when it goes slack.’
Ma paused in her rhythmic swishing of the Swiss embroidered lawn shifts through the cold blue rinse, and handing them over to Carrie for their final rinsing and careful light starching in an isinglass dip. They worked outside in the yard, for the day was a hot one, and Ma’s face glowed as red as the proverbial turkey
-cock’s.
‘We’re all right for the time being,’ Ma said as patiently as she could. ‘Me and Carrie ain’t short of work, and the kitchen servants at the mansions are always generous with any food left over.’
‘Bloody charity!’ Pa bellowed. ‘Since when did we ever have to rely on charity, woman?’
‘When we don’t have anything else, I’d say,’ she said smartly. ‘There’s no use you getting on your high horse and complaining, Sam. If we want to eat, then we have to accept what we can get.’
‘Well, I ain’t staying here and listening to this.’ He leapt up from his wooden yard chair, sending it spinning. ‘And I ain’t prepared to see my women working while I’m idle. It ain’t right.’
‘What you going to do about it then?’ Ma said patiently, knowing what was coming.
‘I’m going down the waterfront to think things over. I may meet somebody down there who’s got some ideas. Anything’s better than sitting here watching you two getting up to your arm-pits in lather.’
He stormed out of the house, and Ma carried on swishing and twisting without a word for a minute, and then she paused to wipe the sweat from her brow.
‘He’ll be back, roaring and cheerful, and ready to take on the world,’ she said calmly to Carrie. ‘But he still won’t have a job to go to in the morning.’
‘Don’t you hate it, Ma?’ Carrie burst out. ‘You know he’s not going to see a man about a job. He’s just going to drink himself out of his wits again.’
‘It’s his way, girl. I’ve known him too long to try to change him. You can’t change a proud man’s habits by threats and tears, and it’s a foolish woman who thinks she can. He’ll come to terms with what’s happening in his own good time. And by then, there may well be more jobs around.’
As she bent to her task more furiously, Carrie thought she was either very brave or very foolish, and couldn’t decide which. But it was a fact that her Pa was coming home drunk every night now. Frank was usually with him, and he was more than tipsy too. Wilf was going the Lord knew where of an evening, and was becoming more secretive than usual.
She had seen nothing more of John Travis. He hadn’t really wanted to know her, she thought bitterly. It was all in her imagination, and the gypsy’s fortune-telling had merely been to excite a gullible young girl.
Ma stood up, easing her aching back. The washing lines in the yard were filled with shimmering fabrics, and the fine shawls and undergarments of the gentry billowed like gossamer sails in the wind. Carrie envied the young ladies who wore them, but envy was a sin, and she tried to smother the feeling as much as possible.
‘Nearly done,’ Ma remarked in the late afternoon.
‘You and Billy can take a walk up to the Barclay house now, Carrie, and deliver the work that was ironed this morning. Miss Barclay particularly wanted the ivory afternoon-gown, so mind you don’t crease it too much when you fold it.’
Carrie didn’t need a second telling. The yard had become progressively hotter, and the air had stilled until there was barely a breeze now to ruffle the lines of washing. It would be a relief to be up on the grassy Downs where you didn’t feel stifled by the city.
‘Come on, Billy. Help me with the baskets,’ she told him, when he lay lethargically on the rug in the parlour. He knew he’d get some tit-bits from the kitchens, where the Barclay cook always made a pet of him, so he moved reasonably quickly. Carrie packed the garments carefully between tissue paper and laid them gently in the wicker baskets she put onto the handcart. It took the two of them to push the loaded cart up the steep hill, and the two of them to hold it back empty on the return journey.
Nowadays it wasn’t usually empty. After they had left the baskets to be taken upstairs to Miss Barclay, they would go down to the kitchens where Cook was generous in passing on a fruit cake or two, or some meat from the Barclay pantry, and sometimes fruit as well.
There was a message for Carrie that Miss Barclay wanted to see her that day, and she left Billy eating his fill of chocolate pudding at the scrubbed kitchen work-table, praying that he wouldn’t be sick.
She was shown into Helen Barclay’s bedroom, half-dreading that she may have marked one of the recent laundry garments, and was being called to task, when the other girl turned with a smile.
‘Carrie, I’ve been turning out my wardrobe, and there are a few things here that I don’t wear any more, and I wondered if you’d like them,’ she said. ‘If they’re no use to you, then you can do what you like with them. Pass them on to the poor house, or whatever you do,’ she finished vaguely.
Carrie ignored the fact that Miss Helen Barclay wouldn’t have the faintest idea what lesser folk did with passed-on clothes, such as shortening them or cutting them down, or making homely rag rugs for their comfort. She was too enthralled with the pile of clothes that lay on Miss Barclay’s bed. They were far too good for Sunday best for the likes of Carrie Stuckey, and all given to her as a gift from heaven. Such a thing had never happened before, and if it was an act of charity, made out of sympathy because the Stuckey menfolk were out of work, then she didn’t care one jot.
‘It’s very kind of you, miss,’ she stuttered.
‘Nonsense. It’s better than throwing them away. I’ll have them put into your baskets when my clean laundry has been put away, and you can take it all away when you leave.’
Carrie sailed down the servants’ stairs of the mansion as if she walked on air. It would have been far too rude to inspect the clothes she had been given, but she knew they would all be beautiful. She had quickly recognised one or two items, though these cast-offs weren’t Miss Barclay’s finest things, and understandably so. When in the world would Carrie Stuckey have worn satin and lace!
By the time she and Billy were ready to leave, she was feeling cock-a-hoop. Ma would be pleased with the parcels of food Cook had given them, and she was going to have a wonderful evening trying on all her new clothes. And how Elsie was going to envy her! She hadn’t seen her for a couple of days, and they’d been scratchy the last time they met, but this new clobber was going to give her a boost of confidence she sorely needed. What with the men of the house looking so gloomy, and not seeing John Travis since the day of the ship’s launch …
* * *
They pushed the handcart around the back of the house and into the shed in the yard. Billy raced indoors ahead of her with a box containing a precious fruit cake in his arms, yelling to Ma that they were home. Carrie smiled at the excitement in his voice, and then was aware that he quickly became quiet. She piled the baskets on top of one another and lugged them awkwardly into the house.
She prayed that Pa wasn’t back yet. In his present mood, he’d only complain loudly over receiving more charity. She prayed too, that he didn’t have a particularly bad head so early in the evening. She dumped the baskets on the floor of the parlour, and stood up with a sigh of relief from the exertion. And then her heart stopped.
Her Ma was sitting primly upright, with Frank and Wilf stiffly flanking her like matching book-ends. Pa stood glowering by the fireplace, swaying more than slightly, and standing near the front door was John Travis. On the table was an opened brown paper parcel, in which there was a serge working shirt and a pair of neatly pressed trousers. Pa rounded on Carrie at once, slurring his words in the slow, loud deliberation of the very drunk.
‘I’d like to know just how long my daughter has been in the habit of inviting strangers into the house, and offering him her brother’s clothes to wear. Do we have a harlot in the house now, and are we going to have to hang a red light in the window for all to see?’
Carrie gasped at the unfairness of it all, and cringed even more at the shock on John Travis’s face. He must have thought he’d come into a mad-house to hear a man speak to his daughter in such a way.
‘Sir, I assure you it wasn’t like that at all, and your daughter behaved with the utmost propriety,’ John began, but Sam waved his aside, looking dangerously near to falling over until he clung to the
mantelpiece once more.
‘I’d like to hear my daughter’s side of it, if you don’t mind, sir,’ he replied. ‘Well, girl? How long have you known this man, and what does he mean to you?’
Carrie was so humiliated, she could hardly breathe. She would dearly have loved to say he was everything to her — or could be, given the chance. But she doubted that such a chance would ever come now. Her dream was all spoiled, and John would be regretting the day he’d ever set eyes on her.
‘It was my fault!’ Billy suddenly said shrilly. ‘It wasn’t our Carrie’s fault, and she’s not a harlot. What’s a harlot, Ma? Anyway, she’s not, and if I hadn’t fallen in the river —’
‘You did what?’ Pa turned on his son now, his furious eyes daring him to tell any lies. Billy cowered, but he clung to Carrie’s skirt for security, and began to sob.
‘It was my fault. It was when the ship got launched. I fell in the river, and the man jumped in and fished me out. We were all wet, and he had to get back on his boat with the people, and Carrie said there was some of Wilf’s old clobber here that he could wear. We came back home, me and Carrie and Elsie and the man. It weren’t her fault, Pa! It was mine.’
He buried his face in Carrie’s skirt, and Wilf spoke up harshly.
‘I heard something about a child being rescued from the river, but nobody knew the name of the boatman involved, and he refused to be interviewed.’ He turned to John Travis in some disbelief. ‘Are you saying that was you and our Billy?’
John gave a brief nod. ‘I’m afraid it was. It might have been better if we’d come clean from the beginning, Carrie,’ he said, trying to lighten the atmosphere. Then they heard Ma give a choking sob as she realised the implications of what he was saying.
‘Then we owe you our Billy’s life,’ she gasped. ‘And there’s no way we can ever repay you for that.’
In the silence that followed, John spoke evenly.
‘There’s one way,’ he said. ‘You can allow me to walk out with your daughter.’
Hidden Currents Page 7