Annie’s dark eyes blazed. ‘We’re married, Duke. They can say what they like, ain’t nothing can alter how I feel about that!’
The last nine years had been the best of her life. Marriage to Duke Parsons had brought double helpings of happiness that she’d never dreamed of before. He was a stubborn, proud, old-fashioned type of husband; breadwinner, decision-maker, grumbler, worrier. A generous-hearted, stalwart friend. It wasn’t as if they never had a cross word, and Annie gave as good as she got. But they believed in each other, that was the thing. Neither had had a moment’s doubt since they’d reached that altar and promised, ‘For better, for worse.’
‘The law says different,’ Duke pointed out. ‘You know how I feel, Annie, and I know what you’re going through, believe me. But we got to try and keep a clear head here. For a start, what’s going to happen to Wiggin now?’
‘He’s staying put. He ain’t going nowhere, not for a week or two.’
‘But he can’t stay at Ett’s Mission for ever.’
‘No. I already thought of that. That side of it ain’t so much of a problem. I still got a bit put by from the old market-stall days, and I can dip into that and find a place for the poor old sod to stay. I’ll pay his rent for a bit.’
Duke’s frown deepened. ‘You’re sure you can manage that?’
She nodded. ‘Call it my rainy day money. And if this ain’t a rainy day, I don’t know what is.’
He saw her mind was made up and began to follow her line of reasoning. ‘It’d be somewhere nice and handy, I take it?’
‘I thought of the tenement down the court. Joe O’Hagan was just saying this new landlord has kicked a lot out for being late with the rent. There’s plenty of rooms free. Willie could take one on the ground floor with no steps.’
‘That’s the ticket,’ Duke agreed, though his heart was sinking. ‘You think he can get by?’
Annie recalled the wrecked piece of humanity she’d just encountered. ‘No, Duke. I’ll have to look after him.” She looked him straight in the eye.
He lifted his hand to stroke her hair. ‘I know, Annie,’ he said sorrowfully. He cleared his throat, rising to the challenge of her selflessness. ‘I been thinking about it. We gotta do the right thing, and I’m saying to you now, love you like I do, and will do to my dying day, I gotta tell you you’re free. You ain’t under no obligation to stay on at the Duke, see.’
‘Free?’ Annie repeated the word like a death sentence. ‘You ain’t sending me on my way, Duke?’
His voice broke down: ‘Never in this world, Annie darling. Only, we gotta do what’s right.’
Annie went and clung to him. ‘I’m trying. But this is hard. I’d cut off my right hand for this never to have happened!’
‘But it has.’
They talked long into the night, growing calmer, trying to look ahead into the future. The first thing they wanted to do next morning was to include everyone else in what had taken place. They asked Hettie to break the news to Jess, while Sadie explained to Ernie that Duke and Annie had hit a problem they wanted to share with the family. Everyone was coming to Sunday tea.
Ernie nodded and went and got his best collar from the top drawer. He polished his boots and paid special attention to his teeth and hair. It was Ernie’s wide, simple smile that greeted Mo and Grace that afternoon as they leaped upstairs.
‘Now you all know this ain’t the sort of Christmas get-together we had in mind,’ Duke began. They’d arrived in Sunday best, as smart a bunch as he could wish to greet; the two men in their tight-fitting suits with wide lapels, the girls beautifully kitted out, thanks to Jess and Hettie’s skill with the needle. His grandchildren were shiny clean in white collars and socks. ‘No need to say why not, worse luck,’ he went on. He looked down at Annie, who sat in her own fireside chair, turning her head this way and that with birdlike precision, her face glad as little Mo scrambled on to her knee.
Duke stood next to her, back to the fire, with the others gathered round, sitting or standing, and Rob leaning against the mantelpiece in his usual self-assured pose. ‘Annie’s asked me to start doing the talking,’ he said. ‘She wants you to know she ain’t thrilled by Wiggin turning up out of the blue. But he’s a sick man, and Annie wants to look after him.’
Frances leaned across and murmured to Billy. Jess warned Maurice to hear Duke out.
‘Now, we all know her too well to try and change her mind. So she’s been down the court this morning to have a word with Bertie Hill about renting a room.
‘How sick?’ Maurice asked, in spite of his wife’s warning. It was where everyone’s thoughts were tending.
‘Pretty bad,’ Duke confirmed. ‘But if he does pull through, Annie wants to have me room ready and waiting.’
‘Even after what he’s done to you?’ Again Maurice was the one to give vent to a common feeling. ‘This is the one what left you in the cart, remember? Not so much as a by-your-leave, according to Jess here.’ He recalled the details of Annie’s story; how Wiggin had taken off during one of his regular trips to sea. He’d told Annie he’d be away for two or three weeks. Weeks turned into months and months into years, and not a penny, not a word did he send. She wore out his old boots, tramping up and down the court, scrimping and saving to get by, building up a life for herself by running her haberdashery stall on Duke Street market. She’d been abandoned, but she refused to let it beat her. Only after years of silent struggle did she give Wiggin up for dead and set her sights on the widowed landlord at the Duke. When Duke had eventually proposed marriage, Annie had her runaway husband officially declared missing at sea, presumed dead; only to having him turn up again now, doing his Ancient Mariner act.
Now Annie felt it was her turn to speak. She touched Duke’s hand. ‘It ain’t that simple, Maurice. Yes, he left me in the lurch, I don’t say he didn’t. But it depends how you look at things. According to the law, and Duke and I have talked this one through, Willie and me is still married.’
Sadie looked at Frances in alarm. Rob stood up and moved restlessly round to the back of the group, out of his father’s gaze. The others stared wide-eyed or frowned at their own feet.
‘But according to Ett, he don’t even know who you are!’ Frances intervened. ‘How can you still consider yourself married to him?’
Annie ploughed on. ‘It’s not me. It’s the law, Frances. Ask Billy, he’ll tell you the same thing as me. Anyhow, I ain’t that hard-hearted. I gotta find the poor bloke a roof over his head, whatever he done. You all see that, don’t you?’ She pleaded for their understanding. ‘Duke seen it straight off!’
Jess came up and took Mo gently from her, stooping to kiss her cheek. ‘Poor Annie,’ she said. She carried the boy back to her own chair.
‘Thanks, Jess.’ Annie sniffed into her handkerchief. ‘And your pa has told me he won’t hold me to vows that ain’t legal no more. He says I can go.’ Her voice trembled, her hands shook, a solitary figure in her big fireside chair.
‘Not to Wiggin!’ Sadie’s outrage broke through.
Ernie heard Annie’s last words with dawning dread. Slowly the picture of how things might change formed inside his head. He wandered out on to the landing and sat at the head of the stairs, frowning at the wall.
Annie shook her head. ‘No, I ain’t never going back with him. There’s no law says I have to be his wife again, as far as I know; only the one saying I can’t be your pa’s no more.’
‘More’s the pity.’ Frances looked up at Billy. She knew what Annie and Duke must have gone through to reach this decision.
‘Pity is right,’ Annie said. ‘Anyhow, the plan is, I’ll move my bits and pieces out of here this evening, back down the court to my old house.’ She moved swiftly on. ‘I’ll need a hand from you, Rob, to carry my trunk in your cab. And I’ll need plenty of elbow grease to get the old place shipshape again. Where’s Ernie? Grace, sweetheart, you run and find him and ask if he’ll sort out the rats in the cellar like he used to.’
Her e
nforced cheerfulness drove Hettie to tears. She’d prayed all morning in church for this not to happen; Annie having to move out, down to her dusty, deserted house in the corner of Paradise Court.
‘Don’t take on, Ett. Ain’t nobody died yet, is there?’ Annie couldn’t bear it if good, strong Hettie broke down. She spotted Ernie drift back into the room, gazing uncertainly from her to his pa. ‘Listen here, Em!’ Annie went and seized him by the hand. ‘I ain’t going far. Ask your pa; he says it’s for the best. And I can carry on working behind the bar. So cheer up, things ain’t as bad as they look!’
She repeated her own advice to herself later that evening when she sat down at her own lonely fireside, amid the smells of carbolic soap and lavender polish, with only the silver-framed portrait photograph of Duke smiling down at her from the mantelpiece.
Chapter Eight
The women of Paradise Court approached the Christmas of 1923 with a mixture of dread and determination. This was the time when finding presents for the children and a bit of extra meat for the table became a pressing burden to people already working through the night to exist, taking in washing or going out to clean in hotels and restaurants. Those who could bring home leftover bread and a knuckle of boiled bacon considered themselves lucky. The others took in still more outwork. Katie O’Hagan, for instance, sat the little ones around the kitchen table with cardboard and paste, where she supervised the making of matchboxes. She was set on buying their mother, Mary, something special for Christmas out of the one penny per hour which made up each child’s average earnings.
Some of the men tried hard too to make this a time of seasonable enjoyment. But many were demoralized by chronic unemployment in the docks, and they took refuge in the pubs, often staying till well after midnight. Joe O’Hagan, his health failing, struggled to keep on his porter’s job at Jack Cooper’s drapery store, but nevertheless was one of the Duke’s regulars, along with the unemployed Arthur Ogden. On the Monday of Christmas week, he came in with twelve shillings worth of hard-earned tips, laid it on the counter and demanded a supply of drink to keep him going through the festive season.
Annie looked at him tartly from behind the bar. ‘What’ll it be, Joe?’ To her mind, a man wasn’t a proper man unless he could regulate his drinking and put his family before his own need to block out harsh reality.
‘The usual.’ Joe sighed and rolled his cap to fit in the pocket of his worn jacket. ‘Times are bad, make no mistake,’ he told. Arthur in his flat, sad voice. ‘A man in work is a lucky man, believe me.’ Over the years, Joe’s hangdog look had increased; he stooped under the weight of his responsibilities, his pale, thin face was lined as tissue-paper, and his wide mouth had turned down in a permanent scowl.
Annie noticed his hand shake as he raised his glass to his lips.
‘Go easy,’ Duke warned Annie under his breath. ‘Make sure he can get home in one piece.’
‘I’ll see him on his way,’ she promised. Under the brand-new arrangement of Annie living at the bottom of the court, she could easily walk Joe home to Eden House.
Dolly Ogden’s sharp ears picked this up. Tingling with curiosity, she leaned over the bar for a confidential chat. ‘You made a nice job of them front windows of yours, Annie. I seen you out there yesterday afternoon with your leather and bucket. Shining like a new pin, they are now.’ She nodded her approval.
Annie sniffed. She intended to give nothing away.
‘Took me aback a bit, I can tell you.’ Dolly creaked still closer, her old-fashioned stays straining against the bar-top. Like many of the older women, she stuck to the clinched and corseted look of her own youth. She derided the new, flat-chested style, showed off her cleavage and hid her girth behind strong laces and whalebone. ‘I never thought in a month of Sundays that I’d be seeing you move back in down the court!’
‘I seen you on your doorstep, Dolly.’ Annie went on steadily serving. ‘I never seen you offering to lend a hand though.’
‘I never liked to butt in, Annie.’
‘Since when?’ Annie put money in the till. ‘Pull the other one!’
‘Anyhow, I seen Rob and Ernie helping to carry your stuff down. Charlie was working, otherwise he’d’ve lent a hand.’
‘But not me with my bad back,’ Arthur put in. ‘Can’t lift nothing heavy these days. It goes without a by-your-leave, and there I am, laid flat out. I have to go steady on the allotment, else I’ll put it out good and proper.’
‘But it don’t stop yon lifting a pint glass,’ Dolly observed. She felt cheerful; the pub’s shiny mirrors and fancy windows took her out of herself, the company and a fine old gossip did her good. ‘Annie, you and Duke must have had a ding-dong battle for you to pack up your stuff and move out!’
‘No.’ Annie clamped her mouth tight shut. She swept empty glasses from the bar and took them to the sink.
‘You can’t fool me, Annie Parsons! It don’t make no sense otherwise.’
‘It don’t to you, Dolly. But it do to Duke and me.’
‘It ain’t natural, Annie. A man and wife can’t live in separate houses. I mean to say, Arthur here snores something shocking, but I ain’t kicked him out of bed yet and we been married twenty-eight years.’ She sighed; Arthur’s snoring was one of the crosses she had to bear.
Annie knew it would only be a matter of time before the news broke. She spotted the sturdy figure of Bertie Hill come through the doors; she must tackle him about renting a room for Willie. Then the whole world and his wife would know. She shook her head at Dolly. ‘Wait and see,’ she advised. ‘And don’t go bothering Duke about it. You’ll find out soon enough, and when you do, I don’t want you poking your nose into what ain’t none of your business, you hear me, Dolly?’ She fixed her to the spot with the ferocity of her stare.
‘Me?’ Dolly attempted outrage, but she knew Annie meant business; no tittle-tattle. ‘Don’t take on, I’ll mind my Ps and Qs,’ she promised. Then she shook her head. ‘It don’t seem right to me.’ She thought Duke looked worried and worn out, and she could tell Annie was only putting a brave face on things. ‘It don’t seem right at all.’
On the same Monday before Christmas, Sadie had to perform her own version of ‘doing the right thing’. She went to work, and after Turnbull’s public dressing-down over the badly typed letter, she’d put her head down and got through more than her fair share of work.
She sat at a long desk with three other typewriters, all women. They were all under thirty, nicely dressed, their nimble fingers flashing across the black and silver keyboards, sitting upright at their tapping machines. The work may have been repetitive, and Turnbull’s standards ridiculously high, but it was clean work, and they had the sense of belonging to the modern age, free of the slave labour of factory and domestic work.
Turnbull’s bark was nasty, but it was worse than his bite. In fact, the chief clerk held uneasily on to his own job; the women had proved themselves to be fast and efficient office workers, and he knew that his era of pen and paper and handwritten ledger books had passed for ever. He was a tall, thin man with grey hair that grew low on his brow but was combed straight back in a thick, greased pelt. He wore a grey moustache and thick glasses. At home he had a wife ill with tuberculosis, and three grown-up, unmarried daughters.
When lunch-break finally came, Sadie made her excuses to the other girls and slipped out to the depot to see Walter. She hoped to find him alone; Rob had mentioned a business appointment and Richie had been given a day off. But she knew she had only half an hour to break her news. Her stomach felt tight ard fluttery as she half ran down Meredith Court, across the cinder yard into the gloomy garage.
Walter looked up from the desk with a smile. The sight of Sadie was enough to raise his spirits as he pored over the lists of figures which Rob had left for him to study. She came towards the office, stepping neatly between lathes and hoists, looking anxiously towards him. His smile faded as he came to meet her. He altered his expression and prepared himself for a serious
talk.
Sadie had known Walter for most of her life. He’d been a pal of Rob’s at school, then he’d worked at Coopers’ and stood by the family all through Ernie’s trial, before following Rob off to war. Unlike her brother, Walter had survived unscathed and come home to take up the old dream of running a taxicab business. The Army had helped build up his physique. His tall frame had filled out and he wore his wavy brown hair short and neat. He spoke little about life in the trenches and he even hid his disappointment with King and Country when they failed to offer him a decent means of making his living. He saw other young East Enders, more prepared to skirt wide of the law than he was, rising in the world through dubious trading on the docks or on the markets. Others got themselves a training in trades he didn’t understand or care for; hotel work in the West End, or making new-fangled electrical equipment in the great new factories that sprang up wherever they demolished the old blocks of flats.
Walter lacked the ambition of a Maurice Leigh, but he was steady and determined. Over Sadie he was downright dogged. This was the woman he set his heart on, once she’d outgrown her schoolgirl crush on Charlie Ogden. She had spirit and good looks, and the war had brought Walter enough self-esteem to suppose he could win her if he set his mind to it. He knew he was braver and more steadfast than other men, thought that even if it was a deficiency within him that had let him go over the top into enemy fire without hesitation, then this was the same quality that made him reliable and loyal. He had patience. He would save towards the taxicab dream, and he would be there for Sadie, to take her dancing or to her favourite pastime, the picture-house.
In time this had won her over. She knew other men who were flashier, funnier, more charming, but not one paid her the same level of attention as Walter. He admired her looks, her decision to better herself by taking typing classes at night-school, the ease with which she held down her job at Swan and Edgar. As far as Walter was concerned, she could do no wrong. To be quietly adored was not the fate of every girl she knew, so for two or three years Sadie had counted her blessings and basked in Walter’s affection.
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