Child of the Mersey

by Annie Groves

  ‘Oh, the table looks lovely, Mam!’ Megan said, her face alight with a beaming smile. ‘Doesn’t it look lovely, Dad?’ Charlie looked at the table as if seeing it for the first time and muttered something unintelligible while Mrs Kennedy went straight to her chair at the side of the fire.

  ‘I’ve been stuck in the shop having to do the evening papers on my own. We don’t all have the luxury of swanning off for the afternoon.’ She pursed her lips and looked pointedly at Rita.

  Rita chose to ignore this dig and gently ruffled her daughter’s hair, accepting the understanding smile from Megan. Where would she be without her children, she wondered.

  ‘I’ll do the morning papers and Saturday’s,’ Rita said, determined not to have her good mood spoiled.

  ‘What about the wedding?’ Mrs Kennedy’s tone was sharp, almost accusing.

  ‘It’s not until three o’clock. I’ll work in the morning and Veronica will be in to do the afternoon and the evening papers.’ Veronica lived next door to Vera Delaney, worked in the shop part time, and had a soft spot for Eddy Feeny.

  Mrs Kennedy did not give the table a second glance, let alone comment on it, as they all sat down to eat Rita’s delicious celebratory tea …

  ‘More trifle, Charlie?’ Rita lifted the heavy cut-glass bowl, her mother’s pride and joy, which was on loan for the occasion. ‘I said to Kitty when she took round Nancy’s cake—’

  ‘I can’t believe that Kitty Callaghan has been entrusted with making that wedding cake. She’ll have pilfered the money for it and substituted cheap ingredients. It’ll be inedible.’

  Rita silently counted to ten before answering. ‘Kitty made that cake out of the goodness of her heart and never expected to be paid for it. Mum only gave her some money after she’d brought the finished cake round. Kitty’s a great cook, the cake will be delicious.’

  Mrs Kennedy stuck her nose in the air and wrinkled it. ‘That Callaghan family are a bunch of layabouts and you should have nothing to do with any of them. That father of hers practically lives in the Sailor’s Rest, and as for that Danny Callaghan, he’ll get his collar felt one of these days, you mark my words.

  Rita sighed. Ma Kennedy could suck the pleasure out of just about anything, but it was a special occasion so she let it go. She looked to her children and smiled. They were good kids and her love for them had kept her from walking out many a time.

  ‘Does she have to do that?’ Mrs Kennedy asked Rita, and nodded to Megan, who was scraping her bowl clean of delicious trifle. Michael, in support of his sister, it seemed, began to scrape his bowl, too. Mrs Kennedy smiled indulgently and Rita felt her good mood slipping away. It made no sense to Rita why her mother-in-law favoured her son. She had a strong hold over her own son, for some reason, but Rita did not want her to have a hold over Michael, too, nor would she be beholden to the woman who could so easily make her life miserable.

  ‘I hope Michael will have something new to wear on Saturday. Those best trousers are way too small for him,’ Mrs Kennedy said.

  ‘There’s no money spare; his best suit will have to do for a while longer, I’m afraid. I can still let the trousers down a bit.’

  ‘There’s no way you can let him go to a wedding in those!’ Rita braced herself for one her mother-in-law’s rants. ‘And there’s no way I’m letting the street see my only grandson going round in shoddy clothes.’

  Rita looked to her husband. ‘I don’t think we can afford to buy new clothes for the children, can we, Charlie?’

  ‘Megan doesn’t need anything new, she’s going to be a bridesmaid,’ interrupted Mrs Kennedy.

  Was it her imagination or could Rita feel the walls of the sitting room closing in on her? The heat was stifling. Mrs Kennedy had insisted on keeping the windows shut to keep the bluebottles out but all Rita wanted to do right now was throw the windows open and take in a big gulp of air. She felt defeated.

  Looking at Charlie, she said, ‘There’s some money put by in the Post Office. We could use some of that,’ thinking it was no wonder they were taking so long to save for a deposit on a house of their own if his mother kept coming up with schemes to spend their hard-earned savings.

  ‘I know.’ Charlie’s eyes were cold when he looked at Rita. ‘I was just going to suggest that. I’ll get it from the Post Office tomorrow.’ Charlie dropped his spoon into the empty bowl. Suddenly he was not in the mood for more trifle. He was in the mood for something else. However, that something else would not happen under this roof. Not with his mother sleeping in the next bedroom. Anyway, Charlie thought, he was going to see that potential new client later. Her husband, in whose firm she worked, was away a lot. She made sure he did not go without womanly comforts when he went to ‘collect her premium’ every Thursday. She was lonely and looked forward to his visits. He was doing her a favour really.

  ‘I have a bit of business tonight, so I’ll be late.’ He did not look at his wife, only to his mother, who nodded and smiled while holding her bowl out for Rita to refill.

  ‘You have to work tonight, of all nights?’ Rita protested, as her earlier anticipation vanished to be replaced with utter disappointment.

  ‘I imagine it would be difficult to have any savings at all if you did not work so hard.’

  ‘Nigh on impossible, Mum,’ Charlie patted his mother’s hand, ‘and I don’t know where we would be without your continuing support.’

  Rita breathed a heavy sigh. It was just like Charlie to side with his mother. She couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t feel like an unwelcome visitor under Mrs Kennedy’s roof. Charlie’s father, Mr Kennedy, had died of Spanish flu when Charlie was just a child and he had never known his father. As a result he and his mother seemed joined at the hip. She wondered if the walls of the room really were closing in, or if it was just her over-active imagination.

  ‘I’m sorry, Charlie …’ Rita stretched her hand across the creaking bed and Charlie turned his back to her. They slept in the front room above the shop overlooking Empire Street, the bedroom that had once belonged to Charlie’s parents, and Rita hated it. His mother slept in the next room and the walls were paper-thin.

  ‘Maybe all this overtime you’ve been doing,’ Rita whispered, ‘will take us a step closer to having a home of our own.’

  ‘Shut up, Rita. She will hear you!’ Charlie replied through gritted teeth.

  ‘If we had our own place …’ Rita inched tentative outstretched fingertips across the mattress towards him. However, the tone of his voice stopped her short of actually touching him. She stared at his back, ramrod straight as he sat rigidly on the side of the bed. She knew Charlie had had an unsuccessful journey to his client, and was not in the mood to make love to his wife now. However, that was nothing new.

  ‘I’m tired … It’s work… The threat of war …’ You name it and I’ll use it for an excuse.

  There had been a time when he couldn’t wait to get Rita into bed. Normally he enjoyed a little contest to see if he could get a woman to give herself to him. He’d had his eye on Rita for a while before he’d bedded her, her flame-red hair and flashing eyes, along with her shapely figure; her rounded breasts swelling beneath her clothes. Rita was younger than him by a good few years and she’d had eyes only for that Jack Callaghan. Then when he went off to Belfast or wherever it was he’d gone Charlie had seized his chance. She’d been easier to bed than he thought and her willingness to succumb had surprised him. At the time her passion and hunger had only inflamed his desire for more. But then she told him she was pregnant and he had paid tenfold for his little weakness. Usually, once he caught what he wanted he soon lost interest. He loved the challenge, the chase. But Rita had well and truly caught him out. There was no way he could leave her in the lurch like he could the others before her. His trouble was he had broken the golden rule and brought trouble to his own doorstep. The shame would have killed his mother if their name had been muddied. So he had done the ‘decent thing’. Now he couldn’t bear the sight of Rita. Somet
imes his urges would get the better of him when his ‘home visits’ were a little quiet. Then he would take her just how he wanted her.

  That new woman he was bedding near Southport had him by the balls, thought Charlie. She was playing him like a good ’un. Her husband owned a large engineering firm in Bootle and she was his accountant. With the threat of war, it should have been so easy to secure the deal. However, Mrs Smallfield was playing cat and mouse.

  The thrill was certainly in the pursuit, Charlie thought, knowing he would secure the policy – a big one even by his company’s standards. However, Mrs Smallfield wanted more than the promise of security for her husband’s firm in time of war. The woman was insatiable. Except tonight!

  Twenty bloody miles and for what? Nothing! No signature and not even the usual shag. Now Rita was coming over to him, unusually seductive. She was the mother of his children, for Christ’s sake! Charlie shuddered. Perish the thought! It had been a long time. The last time she had been so eager Charlie reckoned he could have been anybody.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong, is there, Charlie?’ Now she was using her feminine charms. He knew her game. She was broody, wanted a gang of kids, like her mother, and all live happily ever after. The thought sickened him.

  ‘Go to sleep,’ he mumbled.

  ‘I don’t know what to do about the children, Charlie.’ Rita lay on her back listening to the late-night revellers coming out of the pub at the bottom of the small street. ‘We had somebody around earlier talking about evacuation.’

  ‘Hardly surprising, Rita. Have you heard the news lately?’

  ‘I want to do what’s best for them, of course I do,’ Rita could feel her heart breaking even now, ‘but they missed you so much when you went on that business trip. I don’t know what they would do if they didn’t have either of us.’

  ‘They’ll be fine, Rita,’ Charlie sighed. That brandy he’d had in the Sailor’s Rest was beginning to take its toll and all he wanted to do was sleep now.

  ‘I don’t think I can let them go, Charlie.’ Rita felt the sting of tears behind her eyes.

  ‘You’ll do as you are told,’ Charlie snapped. ‘It won’t be safe around here and if the authorities say they have to go then they will.’

  Rita flinched at his harsh words. If war did come then there would be many changes around here, and not just in this family. Plenty of marriages kept going only for the sake of the children, Rita knew, and hers was one of them.

  ‘We could move to the countryside. It would be safe there.’

  ‘Don’t be so stupid, woman!’ Charlie was lying on his back now, looking up at the ceiling, his fingers entwined on his chest as Rita listened to the mournful lament of a tugboat out on the river. It sounded exactly the way she felt. ‘There’s not a chance I could move out now.’

  Leave your mother? Unthinkable! Rita did not voice her thoughts. Instead she lay motionless beside him, anxious and despondent. All Rita wanted was a home of their own, where they could raise the children and be normal. How had she ended up like this? In a loveless marriage to a man who preferred the company of his mother to that of his own wife.

  In the strained atmosphere of the battleground their bed had become of late, Rita wondered silently if Charlie had ever loved her. How different things could have been if Jack had been her husband, as it was meant to be. Rita thought back to her earlier encounter with Jack. All Rita wanted was to be a good wife to Charlie but Jack’s presence always threatened to release those pent-up feelings for him that she had tried unsuccessfully to bury. Why did you have to leave me, Jack? she asked herself for the millionth time.

  Charlie always blamed her for forcing him to marry her because she was pregnant. Now Rita blamed herself too. If only she could turn back the clock. But no, she reminded herself, she loved both of her children though the circumstances of their conception were so different. Living here under this roof with Charlie and his mother was the price she must pay for her mistake. Marry in haste, repent at leisure, isn’t that what they said? It was certainly true in her case. She must make the best of it and do the right thing by the children. Charlie was right on that score. It was up to a woman to make a marriage work, everyone knew that, and if hers wasn’t working it was because she was doing something wrong. Rita vowed to try harder. Sometimes Charlie did want to make love to her, and then it was different, though there didn’t seem to be much love involved either.

  A creak on the landing had Rita turning to the door. She knew Mrs Kennedy was not averse to holding a glass to the wall and earwigging their private conversations.

  ‘Get some sleep. We have to be up early tomorrow,’ Charlie said, his eyes closed.

  ‘I had hoped you would have taken the night off, we could have asked your mum to mind the kids and gone to the cinema,’ she couldn’t help saying.

  ‘Thursday is our busiest night,’ Charlie said, listening to the drinkers calling good night and making a racket after imbibing their wives’ housekeeping money. A part of him envied them their freedom; another part said, Irish peasants! No wonder their kids have rickets and dress in rags. Charlie did not voice his thoughts: Rita, being of Irish stock, would not take kindly to the criticism.

  ‘There has been a lot of late-night business recently,’ Rita said quietly.

  ‘That’s because there is a lot of war talk,’ Charlie answered with a sneer. ‘Those that won’t hear of their children being evacuated are insuring them to the hilt!’

  ‘Are they really?’ Rita asked, horrified.

  ‘Well, if anything happens, they can rest assured they’ll have a few bob to spend in the alehouse to drown their sorrows.’

  ‘Charlie! That’s a terrible thing to say!’ She caught sight of her tousled, fiery mane reflected in the dressing table mirror opposite and likened herself to a madwoman. Before she had fallen pregnant, Rita had been training to be a nurse and though she was young, she understood the stories that the women on the wards told each other when they thought no one was listening. About what went on in the bedroom and how husbands and wives were supposed to be with each other. Rita knew that she and Charlie weren’t like other couples. Maybe he thought her unattractive. Charlie shrugged her hand off his arm and, feeling another wave of rejection, Rita moved back to her side of the bed.

  Even if she could not make out his expression in the darkness, she knew from the unyielding position of his body that his countenance would be grim. He stretched a little but he did not turn towards her.

  ‘Charlie, I …’

  ‘Rita, how many times have I told you not to call me Charlie? You know it irritates Mother.’ His voice was cold, so different from the light-hearted, almost loving way he had expressed his affection for her earlier.

  Your mother might as well be here. Rita moved her hands from their temporary resting place on the candlewick counterpane, and pummelled the lumpy feather pillow in silent frustration.

  ‘Why can’t you just relax?’ In the heat of the darkened room, Charlie’s tone was belligerent now.

  ‘I am relaxed.’ Her body stiffened as she smoothed the freshly laundered, white cotton case over the grey striped pillow. ‘It will be different when we get our own place.’ She ignored the small but obvious stiffening of her husband’s body.

  The light of a passing vehicle heading to the docks arced across the mottled ceiling, filling the darkened room with glaring light. Then a sudden knock on the bedroom door shattered the hush of the night.

  ‘Charles! Charles! Are you awake?’ Mrs Kennedy’s strident enquiring would have woken the inhabitants of Ford Cemetery, Rita thought. If they had been asleep before his mother started ran-tanning on the bedroom door, they certainly would not be now!

  ‘I can hear someone in the back yard!’ Mrs Kennedy’s penetrating voice was getting louder and more impatient.

  Charlie raked his hands through his thinning floppy hair and plastered it back against his scalp. After sucking a long, slow breath of sultry night air through his teeth, he pulled on his dr
essing gown over his pyjamas. ‘It’ll be a cat, Mother, go back to bed.’

  By the landing light, entering through the small window above the bedroom door, Rita could see a rivulet of perspiration trickle down his neck and knew he would never do something as outrageous as sleep naked beside her.

  Another impatient knock rattled the bedroom door and Rita pulled the covers up to her chin, worried now that her mother-in-law was going to barge right in.

  ‘What if it isn’t a cat, Charles?’ Mrs Kennedy persisted through the closed bedroom door. Rita knew he would go and see what was wrong; he was unable to say no to his mother.

  ‘I’ll see to it now,’ he said wearily, and for a moment Rita felt quite sorry for him.

  ‘Shall I wait for you to come back?’ she asked, feeling her gritty lids scratch her eyes every time she blinked. The busy day had caught up with her now. However, if Charlie wanted her to stay awake and wait for him, she would ignore the fact that she had been up since five this morning for the paper delivery.

  Stealing a furtive glance at the luminous hands of the round-faced alarm clock, Rita could clearly see the glowing fingers had gone way past midnight.

  ‘There is no point in both of us being awake.’ Charlie’s answer was brusque, his back towards her.

  He did not turn round when Rita said tentatively, ‘We wouldn’t be disturbed if we had our own place, Charlie.’

  ‘Enough, woman!’ he snapped, and she flinched at the ice in his voice. ‘I won’t be long.’ He sounded preoccupied, as if talking to a stranger. ‘Just go to sleep.’ Charlie’s voice was sharp. Final. It brooked no inducement to further intimacy, and Rita experienced that awful stomach-churning emotion that always seemed to accompany their bedtimes. She quickly fastened the buttons on her nightdress, pulling it down over her hunched knees.

  ‘Good night then, Charlie,’ she whispered, trying to retain a small crumb of dignity. However, he did not reply as the bedroom door closed firmly behind him. Turning towards the fireplace wall, Rita wept silent tears as she wondered if there was anything she could do to make their marriage happier.