‘But he does respect me. He did the right thing in asking Pa, didn’t he?’
She heard Ma sigh. ‘I’m talking about the lustier side of a man’s nature, Carrie. It’s when he’s alone with you that it’s most likely to happen, and that’s when you must be at your most watchful. Do you understand me?’
‘I think so,’ Carrie mumbled. Lord knew that Elsie had hinted at it enough times, but she’d always thought Elsie had been exaggerating at the way a boyo tried to fumble at her chest, and how she’d fought him off with much giggling and teasing. Elsie had made it all sound like a lark, while her Ma was so earnest that she cringed with embarrassment.
‘If he wants you to do anything that you don’t want to do, then you’re to say no,’ Ma instructed. ‘If he wants to touch your person, other than in the most respected way, you must resist, Carrie. Otherwise, the way is open to damnation.’
Once her mother resorted to the scriptures, Carrie knew she was being very serious indeed.
Eventually the conversation had ended, and they had each gone thankfully to their beds. But Carrie had tossed and turned, unable to sleep, unable to think of anything but that John Travis might want to touch her person in an intimate way, where she never even touched herself if she could help it, except for washing and drying herself. And she began to wish she’d never agreed to go courting at all.
* * *
A couple of nights later, she was still thinking the same way after the talk with Elsie, which hadn’t really helped at all. And she couldn’t sleep for thinking about it. She heard Frank come to bed, and then Ma. By then, her mouth was dry, and she crept downstairs for a drink of water. The lamp was still burning low, so she guessed Wilf and Pa weren’t home yet. The dull yellow glow threw soft shadows around the parlour, filling the room with its rich, oily aroma. And then her heart leapt in alarm as she saw a figure slumped on the settle.
‘Wilf!’ she croaked. ‘You gave me a fright — what’s happened to you?’
She suddenly realised that his face was bloodied, his clothes torn. His handsome face was contorted with rage. He was far more complex than Frank, and rarely confided his thoughts to the family. But she saw how his hands were clenched together, and although his knuckles looked raw, he ignored any pain.
‘It seems that your fancy boatman is a bit of a bare-knuckle fighter,’ he scowled.
Carrie felt her heart begin to beat painfully fast. She certainly hadn’t expected this.
‘You’ve been fighting with John Travis?’ she whispered. ‘For pity’s sake, why?’
His voice was harsh. ‘For one thing, I assured him that if he hurt you, he’d have to answer to me. And for another, I told him what I thought of him for coming here and taking my clobber. You did wrong to ask him, Carrie, but he was more at fault to accept. Anything might have happened, and I wanted to make sure he understood me.’
‘You had no right to do that! And he wasn’t wrong. He was soaked through, and he had a boatload of people to look after,’ she said, incensed now.
‘Oh, I know all about that. Blokes like him take their chance and cash in on whatever feeble job’s going,’ Wilf said, the weight of his own unemployment clearly adding to whatever other frustrations he felt.
‘Why are you being so hateful?’ Carrie said, close to tears. ‘Don’t you want me to have a boy of my own? Don’t you want to have a young lady yourself someday?’
The minute she said it, she saw his face darken even more, and one hand crashed into the other. Blood oozed out, and without another word, Carrie fetched the medicine box from the scullery, and dabbed some soothing salve on each of the raw knuckles. Instinct told her at once that Wilf was in some kind of trouble with a young lady, and her own association with John Travis was somehow underlining it. She didn’t know how, or who, but she knew her brother well enough to know when he was suffering.
‘You haven’t answered my questions,’ she said eventually. ‘John hasn’t said or done one thing out of place, so why did you fight with him?’
‘I didn’t pick the fight. He did. Your fancy man is clever with the fisticuffs, and has a temper to match anything Pa doles out. You should beware of it, Carrie.’
She felt a shiver of unease. Not that she believed John had picked the fight or sought Wilf out, and she knew only too well how her sharp-tongued brother could goad another person into an argument.
‘Do you have a young lady, Wilf?’ she said, hoping to take him off guard. For a second, he said nothing, and then he gave a short grunt.
‘I thought so, or at least, I thought I had her father’s approval to see her. But it seems I was mistaken. Our late lord and master don’t think me a fit person to court his lovely daughter, now that I’m out of a job. Ironic, isn’t it, when he was the one who fired me?’
‘You don’t mean Nora Woolley?’ Carrie said, unable to believe it. Since she’d had no idea Wilf had been seeing the girl, she couldn’t hide her astonishment.
‘You see? Even you don’t think me a suitable chap for Gaffer Woolley’s daughter.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Wilf. You’d be good enough for the Queen, as far as I’m concerned.’
But she was highly embarrassed now. She’d never been invited to discuss either of her older brothers’ amours, and she felt awkward at seeing Wilf’s dejection. This was her strongest brother, and John Travis had clearly done nothing to ease his self-esteem, she thought resentfully. John was powerfully built, with large, capable hands, and she had a vivid image of the fight that had taken place between them.
Loyalty to her brother made her almost decide not to go to tea with him when the time came … but since she didn’t know where John lived, she couldn’t send a message to that effect. It would be even more embarrassing to let him come to the house in Jacob’s Wells Road and then refuse to go out. Wilf might be able to find him, and pass on the message that she didn’t want to see him again, but she doubted that he’d believe Wilf, and it would probably cause another fist-fight.
Besides, what good would it do? And she did want to see him again, despite all … for one thing, she wanted to get to the bottom of the antagonism between John and Wilf, which didn’t bode well for the future. The prospect of having a young man, and being invited to Saturday tea, should be so lovely, and so genteel. Yet it was filling her with all sorts of doubts and unease.
‘Never mind about me,’ Wilf said now. ‘You just mind yourself, that’s all. And get on back to bed before Pa comes home, or that’ll be wrong.’
For a second, she wished she dared give him a hug and a kiss, hating to leave him bruised like this. But they weren’t a kissing family, and he’d probably think she’d gone soft in the head if she did any such thing.
So she went back to bed, and brooded even more about John Travis, and how she had to mind herself, and wished even more heartily that she’d never met him at all.
* * *
The Saturday of the visit was fine and sunny and warm, the way a midsummer day should be. By then, Carrie had rubbed so much lanolin into her hands to soften them, that two of her finger-nails had succumbed to it and split. She had to cut them almost down to the quick to stop them catching on the best blue frock she was wearing for the occasion.
Its silk frills and folds that sat so gracefully over the hooped petticoat had once adorned the slender figure of Miss Helen Barclay, and had been adapted and shortened by Ma, until it fitted her snugly. She adored the feel of it against her skin, and waited in a mixture of dread and anticipation for the arrival of John Travis that afteroon.
‘You look too fine to be our Carrie,’ Billy complained, when she refused to play with him in the yard for fear of soiling the frock. ‘I don’t like you being posh.’
‘I’m not posh, you goose.’
‘Yes you are, and I don’t like it when you try and talk all funny, like that Miss Barclay.’
Carrie tried not to look at Ma, busily cutting strips out of some of the other discarded Barclay garments to stitch into a new ra
g rug. With the heavy amount of foot traffic in the small house, the rugs wore out fairly quickly, and constantly needed renewing, so they were fortunate in being supplied with plenty of bags of cast-off clothing from thes toffs’ houses for the task.
‘Carrie wants to look her best, because she’s invited out for tea,’ Ma said evenly. ‘But she’s still the same Carrie inside, no matter what she’s wearing.’
‘Why aren’t I invited out to tea?’ Billy said at once. ‘John Travis is my friend too.’
‘I’m not sure he should be anybody’s friend any more,’ Ma said, more severely than usual. Carrie felt her skin prickle again, the way it did whenever she felt defensive.
‘I thought you were on our side, Ma.’
‘Your Pa’s taken umbrage at the fighting between him and Wilf, and I don’t blame him. We ain’t got much, but we’ve got our pride, Carrie, and street fighting’s shameful.’
‘I might have guessed that Wilf would lay all the blame on John,’ Carrie said bitterly. ‘But it seemed to me that they each provoked the other.’
Ma seemed more prickly than usual, and she had a pinched, tight look on her face that invited no arguments. At the look, Carrie wisely knew when to desist, and of course, Ma knew nothing about Wilf’s own problems. Wilf had his pride too, as fierce as Pa’s, and Carrie guessed that no-one but herself knew how Wilf smarted over Gaffer Woolley’s slight.
He certainly wouldn’t have confided in Frank, who would have blabbed it everywhere. Carrie couldn’t really see why her own walking-out with John Travis so offended Wilf, but she supposed that in his present state of mind, he was ready to resent any other couple who had a sunny relationship.
She wasn’t sure yet that that description could be applied to herself and John Travis. John had fought with Wilf, and they were at loggerheads. And what affected one member of their family, affected all of them. It was their way.
‘Just be thankful your Pa’s snoring the afternoon away as usual, or you’d be getting even more instructions, girl,’ Ma said sharply. ‘And don’t be home later than eight o’clock.’
‘Oh, Ma! Eight o’clock’s for children!’ she spluttered, seeing the humiliation in announcing such a curfew to a young man.
‘It’s late enough this first time. Stick by the rules, Carrie. Your Pa was all for sending Wilf or Frank with you to meet these fine folk, so be thankful I persuaded him to change his mind on that.’ Her voice softened a mite. ‘I know you’ll want to be alone with your young man, Carrie, but just mind everything I’ve said.’
Carrie’s heart beat sickeningly. Did she want to be alone with her young man? How would she know what to say, how to behave, how to react if he wanted to hold her hand or kiss her? How far was she supposed to accept his advances? For a wild moment she ached to retreat straight back into childhood, playing with marbles and wooden spinning tops, the way Billy was doing in the backyard now. She didn’t want to venture into this realm of adulthood, where everything was fraught with dangers and unknown delights.
‘That’ll be him now,’ Ma said, as they both heard a knocking on the front door. And Carrie knew it was far too late to change her mind.
* * *
She stepped into the sunlight, feeling as if she was going to her execution, rather than a tête-à-tête with a young man. But it wouldn’t be like that for the whole day, she remembered with a rush of relief. She was meeting his uncle, the older man she had glimpsed in the boat on the day of the Great Britain’s launch. The two men had seemed as working-class as themselves then, but now …
She was tongue-tied from the moment she saw John. He was Saturday-spruced in his gentleman’s clothes, as fine as herself in her hand-me-down frock, but there was also an unmistakeable air about him. It wasn’t the inborn breeding and self-confidence of the Clifton folk., but it wasn’t far off. It diminished her dwindling self-confidence, especially when he offered her his arm in the way the gentry did. She felt a bit silly at taking it, as if she were an invalid or something.
‘It’s a fine afternoon for walking,’ he said, when she didn’t seem to offer any conversation at all. ‘Have you ever been to Bedminster Hill before, Carrie?’
‘No. I stay on our own side of the river, though I’ve been into the city often enough, and up the hill to Clifton many times,’ she said. She immediately bit her lip, for he’d know why she went there by now. She didn’t consort with Clifton folk, except to collect their soiled laundry, and deliver it again when she and Ma had washed it.
‘It’s a different world on the other side of the river,’ he commented. He probably hadn’t meant anything by the remark, but to Carrie, it seemed to emphasise the status of the Bedminster Hill folk. They walked in silence, and Carrie wondered if they were ever going to regain the easy friendship of their first meeting. The time between had been too long.
How had she ever dared to ask this fine young man to borrow her brother’s clothes? How had she dared to invite him into their narrow little house? And how dared she demean herself and her family by thinking themselves so much less than he?
By the time they reached the foot of the steep climb, she was wishing herself miles away from here. John must surely be wondering why he’d asked out such a dummy, and she couldn’t help remembering those eloquent university students with whom he’d chatted so easily on Clifton Downs. He was the type who could talk with anyone — except her, it seemed.
She was very conscious of the dark swelling on his cheek, and the cut above his eye, for which she assumed Wilf was responsible. Wilf disapproved of her seeing John, and however much she thought she had a right to choose her own friends, she had always respected Wilf’s judgement, and felt a sense of disloyalty to him. And however stupid or misguided that was, it was a feeling she couldn’t ignore, and it put an invisible barrier between herself and John Travis.
Chapter 6
Wilf Stuckey wasn’t used to deception. He didn’t have the open nature of his aptly named brother, Frank, but he wasn’t one for intrigue either. He’d never taken more than a passing interest in girls, and he’d often thought that if his sister’s irritating and flirtatious friend, Elsie, was anything to go by, he’d as soon steer clear of them. But all that was before he met Miss Nora Woolley.
He’d seen her around the wharf occasionally, of course, when she’d come there with a message for her Pa. And like many of the other dock-workers, he’d touched his forehead or tipped his cap to the golden-haired girl, and watched her elegant progress through the maze of ropes, wood and metal on the wharf, and wondered how a bull of a man like Aaron Woolley could have fathered such a delicate maid.
But he’d never expected to fall hook, line and sinker, as the saying went. He’d thought he had too steady a head on his shoulders to be so stunned by the mere sight of a girl. His heart felt as if it was alternately in his boots or bouncing about in his chest like river flotsam. He was both amused and amazed at the change that this situation had brought about in him.
He found himself thinking of every line of poetry he’d ever heard — which didn’t amount to many — every ditty that was ever sung in praise of a pretty face — and applying them all to the love of his heart. And the glory of it was, that the enchanting Miss Nora Woolley seemed just as enamoured of himself as he was of her. Which meant that everything should have been plain sailing.
Wilf scowled as he strode along the waterfront in the direction of the city on that Saturday afternoon, having got out of the house long before John Travis was due to take his sister off to Bedminster Hill. Everything was ship-shape for the two of them, he thought resentfully.
Even his Pa hadn’t raised any long-lasting objections to Carrie walking out with the fellow, despite the dubious start to their acquaintance. Wilf didn’t normally take an instant dislike to a man, but there was something about John Travis that had stuck in his gullet.
He was big enough to know it was more than half envy, because Travis seemed the sort who would always get what he wanted, while Wilf had always
had to strive for every bloody thing. Even now, after the magnificence of the occasion just a few weeks ago, when their great ship was safely launched, it had thrown him and his menfolk into the doldrums, while Travis and others like him were picking up even more trade with their summer boating excursions.
But he bloody well wasn’t going to let thoughts of Travis blight this day, he thought resolutely. Nor was he going to let the memory of the other evening spoil it. He was off to meet Nora Woolley in one of the secluded copses in Ashton Park. It was a very recent turn of events that not even his sister Carrie knew about, and he already regretted even mentioning Nora to her at all.
He felt a lift of his heart, just thinking of her name, and refused to heed the unwelcome memory of Gaffer Woolley’s most recent barring of his entrance outside the wrought iron gates of the Woolley residence. His belligerent appearance had startled Wilf. He’d smarted enough when Gaffer Woolley had ticked him off for idly chattering with his daughter, but this had looked more like a confrontation, Wilf thought uneasily.
‘That’s far enough, my fine young cock-bird,’ the man had said in his guttural manner.
‘I wanted to have words with you, Gaffer,’ Wilf had said. The man had always upheld the workmanship of the Stuckey men, as well as being affable to good workers, so this attitude was alien and unexpected.
‘I suspect that you’re about to seek my permission to court my daughter, since she’s been singing your praises at every opportunity,’ Aaron Woolley said baldly. ‘But I’m telling you now that the answer’s no. The fact that I asked you to escort her home on the day of the launch don’t give you any rights, so you needn’t go getting any ideas above your station, boy.’
Wilf had felt a deep humiliation and fury at being stopped so ignominiously, and with such a response.
‘As a matter of fact, I had no such intentions, Gaffer. I came to see you on another matter,’ he’d said stiffly. ‘It’s work that my Pa and my brother and myself are wanting, and nothing else.’
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