by Annie Murray
Inside, to her surprise, she found Sid dozing in the chair beside Alfie, who was also asleep. She crept in, and Sid roused himself as she closed the door.
‘ ’Bout time,’ he said, looking up at her with the bleary eyes of an old man. ‘Our Grace has gone home to bed.’
Rose looked at the clock. She had taken half an hour longer than usual to get home. Had she and Michael really spent so much time talking? It had seemed to pass in seconds.
She saw Sid out, giving herself a ticking off when she remembered how much help they were giving her.
She and Michael met for a brief drink some weeks later, but then it was months before she saw him again. There was no English class on the Thursday evening before Christmas, and they arranged to meet then. Rose knew she was deceiving Grace, who would spend the evening with Alfie. But sometimes she thought Grace would be lost now without her role in Rose’s house. It had become part of her life. And Rose hungered for company, for interest and someone to have a good talk with.
As she sat opposite Michael in the busy Mermaid pub, she found all her doubts disappearing, and relaxed back into enjoying his company. They made an attractive pair, Michael in what looked like a new dark blue suit, his hair cut perfectly and greased back, and Rose with her long hair curling down prettily over her shoulders. She looked beautiful, especially when animated by her conversation with Michael.
They started talking about general things: Michael’s business, the way money was so tight still, and of Michael’s satisfaction that Winston Churchill had been re-elected to office in October.
‘Now things’ll get back to rights again,’ he told her, with the almost superstitious regard in which some people still held Churchill. ‘All that Labour lot messing about. What we need is a proper government – someone who knows what they’re doing. Been like rats from a sinking ship, all these people looking to go abroad to work. What good’s that to our country?’ He pushed back his stool. ‘Another?’
Rose watched him going to the bar. He still walked with the trace of a limp which had stayed with him from his injury in Italy. He was a fine-looking man with strong features and those direct blue eyes, always a hint of mischief in them.
He’s a bit of a chancer, she thought. Bet he gives that poor wife of his the runaround. But she couldn’t resist being with him this evening. He was a connection with the past, and being able to go out and meet him made her feel she could laugh and be her age again, for a short time at least, instead of driven, worried and overworked.
‘I was just thinking,’ he said, sitting down with their drinks, a pint for him and port and lemon for her. ‘If you’re out working all day, who looks after your husband?’
‘Neighbours. I moved back to the Birch Street area again when Alfie was taken bad. They all help mind Hilda, my little girl, too. Me and Grace do the shopping between us – I mean, who’s got the time to stand in a queue for hours on end? Anyroad, that’s all that’s left of the family now. My brother George is . . .’ Blushing, she looked down at the table. ‘He’s in Winson Green.’
‘Jesus! What for?’
‘Burglary. He went bad on us during the war. I was away of course, so I hardly saw it coming. But Grace had him all through. She’s done with him. She don’t even go and visit.’
‘But you do?’
‘When I can. Only every month or two, and he’s due out soon anyroad. He’s my brother. I always had a soft spot for him as a kid. I s’pose it was after the evacuation – he ran away, and he was never the same after he came back. It’s as if—’ She looked up at Michael, and he saw that tears had filled her brown eyes. Gently he leaned over and laid one of his large hands over hers, which were clasped tensely together on the table.
‘It’s as if he went off like a pint of milk. You can’t get through to him any more. When I go over there’ – she grimaced at the thought of the dark stone walls and towers of the prison – ‘he sits there, all pinched in the face. All hard-looking. I don’t know who he is any more.’ Slowly she pulled her hands away.
‘I’m sure you’re doing the right thing,’ Michael told her. ‘Though God knows, with all you’ve got on your plate no one’d think bad of you if you didn’t go.’ Then he asked gently, ‘And your husband – Alfie, isn’t it? How much can he do?’
‘Nothing.’ Rose sounded very matter of fact. ‘It’s got to him very hard and very fast. He doesn’t move out of bed. Can’t do anything for himself at all. Someone has to be about all the time.’
She took in Michael’s appalled expression, realized that he was reaching for her hands again, but she kept them under the table. At that moment she felt that if he touched her she might just turn into his arms and cry out all the worry and tiredness and frustration of the past months. She longed for such comfort, to be able to lean on someone as solid and kind and reviving as Michael.
‘Oh, Rosie,’ he said. ‘You poor, brave kid.’
She could think of nothing else to say to him, and was relieved when after a few moments he started talking. As she wiped her eyes she realized that her telling him about her own life and worries had released him and he was now able to disclose to her his own.
‘When I met Mary, I thought I’d found the best woman ever,’ he told her. ‘She was pretty and sweet. She looked up to me and I loved her. I really thought the world of her, Rosie . . .’ He hesitated, and as she looked across at him she saw confusion in his face.
‘But . . . ?’ she prompted.
‘I don’t know if it’s having the babbies that’s done it. Joseph’s a great kid, and now we’ve got little Geraldine and she’s a bonny babby. But Mary, she’s got time for nothing else. What with feeding Geraldine at night and both of them on all day. And she frowns all the time. You may smile, Rosie, but before I’d hardly seen her crease her face in that way. She was the sweetest girl . . . But now she’s got a line, as if someone’s taken a pencil right down.’ He pointed to the little bridge of flesh between his eyebrows. ‘She never had that before.’
Rose leaned across the table and pointed at her own face, so that a man at the next-door table watched with a puzzled expression. ‘Look – I’ve got one too. They ought to call it the mother’s mark!’
‘But I don’t get it . . .’ Michael trailed off, frowning. ‘You’ve got more worries than she has. She’s not got a care in the world. All women have kiddies, but they don’t go all mardy on you like Mary. She ain’t got time for me, not in any department.’
He sat in gloomy silence for a moment, his deep blue eyes staring unfocusing across the bar. Around them people were laughing and two old men had started singing ‘Roll out the Barrel’.
He brought himself up with a jerk. ‘Sorry, Rosie. Didn’t mean to bring you here and pour out all my troubles. You won’t want to come again?’
She knew it was an invitation.
‘But don’t you think sometimes, looking back to when we was kids at Lazenby’s, we were full of all we were going to do. What was it you went on about? Teaching kids, wasn’t it? And I was going to run the world, have a big business . . .’ He chuckled bitterly. ‘And now look at us.’
‘But you’re doing all right?’
‘All right. That’s about the sum of it. But I wanted more, much more than that. Maybe that’s where I went wrong.’
They talked a little while longer before Rose told him she really had to go in order to get home at the normal time. They walked back together, further into the darkened city, where the points of greatest light and noise were the pubs on corners and down side streets.
‘Meet me again, won’t you?’ he asked as they parted, and she nodded. She knew that this meeting, and the way they had found they could confide in each other, had sealed their need to see each other.
Before she could stop him, he took her in his arms briefly and kissed her hungrily on the lips.
As she walked into Court 11 she tried to push from her mind what had just happened. It was a mistake, the result of an evening of resuming old friend
ship and sharing emotion. She wouldn’t let it happen again.
Quietly she released the catch on the door and pushed it open. For a few seconds she stood startled in the doorway, watching unnoticed before Grace turned, conscious of the draught from the doorway.
Alfie was lying as usual, on one side in the bed. They had to turn him every couple of hours to relieve the pressure on his bedridden body, which opened up his skin into deep sores. Grace was sitting beside him, tenderly holding one of his hands in her own.
Unsettled, and feeling strangely guilty at the apparent intimacy of the scene, Rose moved in briskly, pretending not to have noticed. Alfie’s eyes opened and his face lit up as far as it was able into his lopsided smile.
Everything all right?’ she asked. ‘Hilda asleep?’
‘She’s well gone,’ Grace told her.
Rose poured some tea for all of them.
‘These sores, Rose.’ Grace pointed at Alfie. ‘They’re not getting any better, are they?’
Rose sighed, sipping the warm tea. ‘It’s a losing battle. I don’t know what else we can do.’
The two of them gently turned back Alfie’s bedclothes, and he stirred slightly, his eyes closed again. A rank smell emanated from him, a mixture of sweat and urine and the discharge from the sores.
‘We’ll turn him,’ Rose said. ‘I’m glad you waited. It’s a job on your own.’
They slid their arms under Alfie’s inert body, pulling him gently across the bed, and rolled him over on to his other side.
Grace tutted. ‘Sheet’s wet again. We’ll have to change it.’
Manoeuvring Alfie’s body from side to side, they pulled out the bottom sheet and smoothed over another one. Washing and more washing. Rose carefully wrapped his reddened heels and elbows in soft cloths to help protect them against the bed’s chafing.
They eased Alfie out of his pyjamas. His limbs kept stiffening into muscular spasms, so that for minutes at a time they could not straighten his arms enough to slide on a fresh pyjama jacket.
Before they replaced the trousers, Rose turned her attention to the worst sores at the bottom of his back. On the right side, the top part of his buttock was beginning to break up, the skin all red and cracked, and they were doing all they could to prevent it getting as bad as the other side. On the left a full-blown sore had developed into a discoloured, oozing hole large enough to hold a golf ball. It looked appalling, though Alfie said he was not aware of much pain from it.
Rose carefully pulled off the lint dressing and grimaced. From inside oozed a yellowish grey, foul-smelling liquid. ‘We’ll have to dress it again,’ she said.
The nurse had recommended packing the wound with lint and a concoction of whipped egg whites, something which Rose had a decreasing amount of faith in as a remedy. When they had finished they tucked a bottle between his legs to try and keep the urine off the sheets, and covered him up again.
‘D’you want your tea now, Alfie?’ Grace asked him gently. Almost imperceptibly he nodded his head.
Rose met Michael on other occasions after that. What was the harm in meeting a friend, she reasoned. Except – and the thoughts hovered around and were pushed to the back of her mind – she couldn’t bring herself to tell Grace.
Michael was like a lifeline. How could she give that up when the rest of life, the drab, everyday routine of illness and Turner’s and rationing and struggle offered so little?
As she got out of bed that March morning, the dream of Falcone gradually sliding from her mind, she tried to quell her excitement at the thought of meeting Michael in the evening. After all, they were both married people with families meeting for a chinwag. So why should her feelings be so stirred?
Thirty-Five
‘I needn’t go tonight,’ she told Grace, her guilt making her wish that her sister would demand her presence. ‘I’ll stay if you think you’ll need me.’
Alfie had a bad cold which had gone to his chest, and she had been helping Grace to prop him up so that he could cough and clear his lungs.
‘No, you’re all right. You go,’ Grace said, seating herself on the wooden chair beside Alfie’s head. ‘I can always fetch Gladys in.’
Rose wondered if she was imagining that Grace really preferred it when she was out of the way. Or did she suspect that Rose was not going to a class at all?
‘Well, all right,’ she agreed. ‘I’ll get back as early as I can.’
‘No need.’ Grace pulled some knitting out of an old cloth bag. ‘We’ll get on fine – won’t we, Alfie?’
As she walked into the cosy light of the Mermaid she saw Michael raise an arm to her. He was as usual dressed immaculately. She had never seen him wear anything the least bit worn or shabby. He had on a dark blue suit which emphasized the already powerful outline of his body.
‘Sorry I’m late, Michael,’ she gasped, sitting down at last with relief on the bench opposite him.
‘Oh, no need to apologize.’ He got up as she unbuttoned her coat. ‘What’ll you have?’
Clearly he’d managed to fit in a couple of drinks already. When he came back to their table with the glasses and sat down, Rose immediately sensed a tension between them, something which made her feel self-conscious, and she found it hard to look him in the eyes.
She chatted to him nervously. They must keep things normal and conversational. Within bounds. She must not let him touch her hands across the table as he had done before. Otherwise she could not carry on persuading herself that she was justified in meeting him.
‘Your family all right?’ she asked. ‘How’s Mary? And the babby?’
‘Mary’s getting more sleep nowadays,’ Michael told her. He was sitting with a generous tumbler of Scotch in front of him. ‘They’re all OK. They’re doing fine.’
He sounded evasive, as if he didn’t want to go into how things were between him and Mary. Rose had begun to realize that Michael only found it possible to confide in her if she first disclosed something about herself or showed emotion in front of him, and she was deliberately keeping that at bay.
Suddenly Michael said, ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you something. About your . . . about Alfie.’ Rose waited. ‘Well, how is he?’
Rose was puzzled. ‘Well, he’s not too good. He never is of course. But he’s got a chill at the moment.’
‘I meant . . .’ Michael looked down at the floor between his legs. ‘Is he never going to get right again?’
‘No. There’s nothing anyone can do for him. No cure. Michael, you know that. I’ve told you endless times.’
He shook his head sadly. ‘I thought – I was just making sure.’
‘Anyroad,’ Rose went on. ‘The next thing is George is coming out, next week some time. God knows I’ve wished him out of there often enough, but now he’s really coming I don’t know what the hell we’re going to do with him. I’m scared at the thought, Michael, to tell you the truth.’
‘Where’s he going to live?’
Rose shrugged again. ‘I s’pose he’ll have to come home. I mean where else? Grace hasn’t said a word about it and Dad might as well have forgotten who he is. We’ll just have to see if he can hold down a job.’
‘Can he do anything?’
‘Thieving. He’s good at that.’
Michael laughed, pulling out his cigarettes. Rose felt as if his blue eyes were piercing right through her. ‘You only see your family as they are, don’t you, Rosie? Not like me. Always wanting to put Mary on a pedestal like a plaster statue.’
‘Well, how else?’ Rose joined in his laughter and accepted a cigarette. ‘Bit late to go making up fairy stories about them, isn’t it?’
‘Not for me. It’s just the way I like to dream about people.’ And again the sadness crept back in to his eyes. ‘Trouble with statues on pedestals is that one way or another they keep getting knocked off.’
Then he asked, with the kind of intensity she had started to dread from him, ‘What about you, Rosie?’ He asked the question as if he wanted someth
ing from her: some pronouncement or decision. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to look for a new job,’ she told him. ‘I should be able to get better money now, so I’ll be looking around. I’ve got one place in mind, but really I’m being a bit cheeky. It’s in town, with a solicitor. But I might as well have a try.’
Michael was draining his glass as she spoke. He put the glass down excitedly. ‘Maybe I could find you something. I’m sure I could.’
Rose decided to treat this as a joke. ‘Let me try out my wings first before you rush in to rescue me. But thanks for the offer. Now, let me get the next one in.’
But Michael stubbed out his cigarette with sudden resolve and picked up his coat. ‘Come on, Rosie. It’s not cold out. I’ll take you to see my place. It’s only a walk along the road.’
‘Your house?’ Rose asked, astonished.
‘Jesus, no. I’ll show you the business.’ Seeing her hesitate, he urged her, ‘Come on, what’s the harm? I’d be proud for you to see it. You’ll be home with time to spare.’ He took her arm.
It was a cloudy night and mild, with a threat of drizzle. The shop was only a few streets away, and they walked in silence, well apart, as if they were afraid even of their hands touching by accident. It was an apprehensive, embarrassed silence. Rose knew why he was taking her there, and he knew that she knew. It all seemed inevitable after their meetings, but suddenly so very uneasy. Not at all a comfortable progression from confiding friendship to possible lovemaking, but driven, and somehow at odds.
He stopped outside a quite smart-looking shop front and, looking up, she saw ‘GILLESPIE’S’ in bold dark letters above the window. He didn’t go into the darkened betting shop. Instead he led her up a narrow staircase, between walls covered with brown, chipped paint and smelling of stale cigarette smoke and general dirtiness.
‘Not too nice, that bit,’ he apologized when they reached the top. ‘Come on in here. This is my office.’