Hettie was dressed in uniform, ready to go out. Her bonnet lay on the table, her Quaker-plain jacket was buttoned to the chin. ‘I don’t know, Fran, it’s like he can’t bring himself to think about it. I asked him yesterday after Rob came back from the brewery, should I look round for another place for us? And he just looked up at me with dying eyes. Yes, like he wants to pack-up and die.’ Hettie’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I been praying and asking God’s help, but I ain’t getting no answers.’ She sobbed on Frances’s shoulder.
‘Hush, we’ll sort something out, Ett. Just hush, my dear. Don’t you cry.’ Frances’s self-restraint cracked under the strain of comforting Hettie. They sobbed quietly for a few minutes, to the sound of doors swinging, glasses clinking, people drinking in the bar below.
Then Frances blew her nose and went down the court in search of Annie. She needed to tell her that Duke had agreed that she and Hettie should compose a letter to send to the magistrates, admitting his offence of serving after hours and agreeing to give up his licence. Everyone understood, after listening to Rob, that all was lost. Now Frances wanted to spare her father the unnecessary distress of appearing in court.
She didn’t find Annie in her own little terraced house, but she was still anxious to explain the latest development to her face to face, before it had time to reach her in a buzz of rumour. So she went on from Annie’s house to the tenement, expecting to find her busy tidying up at Wiggin’s place.
Frances had never before ventured into number five Eden House, the misnamed tenement where Wiggin had holed up with Annie’s support. She disliked the feel of the whole building in fact, objecting to the lack of privacy whenever she came to visit the O’Hagans on the upstairs floor; the dark, bare corridors, the peeling plaster. For the inhabitants it was a poor sort of life, overlooked by the tall walls of a furniture factory at the back, with one toilet shared between all the tenants on each floor. As Frances went under the crumbling stone entrance and down some steps to the semi-basement rooms at the back, she instinctively pulled her cardigan around her and knocked briskly at the shabby door marked number five.
She stood and waited. There was someone in there, she was sure. ‘Hello. Annie, is that you?’ Frances shivered in the damp, cold corridor. She knocked again.
Inside she heard a shuffling sound of something heavy being dragged across a bare floor.
‘Mr Wiggin?’ Frances’s suspicions were aroused. It seemed he didn’t intend to answer the door. ‘Is Annie there, please? It’s Frances Wray. I need to speak to Annie.’
‘I don’t know you!’ Wiggin’s muffled voice came back at last.
Frances heard more grunts and gasps as he shifted the heavy object towards, the door. ‘I tried Annie’s place. She ain’t there. I was hoping to catch her. It’s very important.’
There was a stream of abuse as Wiggin clattered around inside the room. The message came through loud and clear; he didn’t want to be disturbed.
Frances backed off in distaste, then she set her head at a determined angle. ‘Ain’t no use calling me them names, Mr Wiggin,’ she retorted. ‘I heard them all before. They don’t bother me.’
Wiggin responded by throwing open the door. He clutched on to it to peer out at Frances, a respectable figure in the fawn cardigan and skirt looking him straight in the eye. He swayed unsteadily, growled and spat out phlegm at her neatly shod feet.
Frances stepped quickly back, out of reach. ‘I want to know, have you seen Annie?’ she persisted. ‘Ain’t she dropped by with your breakfast today?’
Wiggin’s eyes were red, his breath stank of strong drink. He tottered in the doorway, cursing Frances for coming there. ‘Annie this! Annie that!’ he minced, with his top lip curled. ‘I ain’t seen Annie. Annie don’t live here. See for yourself!’ He flung open the door, overbalanced and fell against Frances.
She caught him by the shoulders, filled with disgust, but shocked at how little he weighed. He was skin and bone, easy to drag inside the room and pull on to a poor bed in one corner. There were signs of Annie’s efforts; clean curtains at the window, a tidy grate. But Wiggin seemed to have been on the rampage, scattering bread and milk across the floor, dragging an old chest out of the alcove by the hearth. As Frances eased the old man on to his bed, the smell coming off him made her feel sick. He collapsed on his back, wheezing and cursing.
‘Does Annie know the state you’re in?’ she said coldly. ‘Has she gone for the doctor?’
Wiggin’s chest heaved and erupted. Frances realized with horror that he was laughing. His thin lips stretched back, showing ulcerated gums that were red-raw. He clutched his chest, convulsed with unseemly laughter.
‘It ain’t funny.’ Frances made a snap decision to leave him where he was, noticing an empty bottle by the bed and another half-empty one on the mantelpiece. Satisfied that he had left off laughing and subsided into a lethargic stupor, she quickly closed his door and fled.
Now alarm bells rang, not just for Wiggin. Frances had to find out where Annie had got to. Coming up the court, she bumped into Patrick O’Hagan, a boy of about thirteen who played truant and loitered his life away in the alleys and courts. He nodded when Frances rushed by and asked him if he’d seen Annie lately.
‘When?’ Frances grabbed his arm. ‘Which way did she go?’
‘Ten minutes since,’ Patrick guessed. ‘She went home.’
‘But I tried her door. Are you sure?’
The boy nodded. ‘Sure I’m sure.’
Frances turned on the spot and headed down the street towards Annie’s house again. Why hadn’t Annie answered her door? Why had Wiggin laughed? She mentioned Annie going to fetch the doctor and he croaked his delight. She knocked hard at Annie’s door for a second time. She tried the knob. It turned in her grasp.
‘Annie?’ Frances hesitated on the doorstep. She called gently, ‘It’s me, Frances. Are you in?’
‘I can’t come and see you now, Frances.’ Annie’s voice drifted down the narrow stairs. ‘I’m upstairs having a lie-down.’
This was unheard of. ‘I’m coming up.’ She mounted the bottom step.
‘Leave me alone, there’s a good girl. I’m just resting.’
‘Ain’t you heard me knock before, Annie? I need to talk.’ Frances carried on until she came to the landing.
Annie’s bedroom door opened. She came out fully dressed, her face averted. She trembled and reached out to the banister for support. ‘I didn’t want no one to see me,’ she whispered.
There was a gash across her left eyebrow, an inch long, just missing the eye. A trickle of blood still ran down her cheek. The eye itself had swollen and begun to bruise. Frances stopped in her tracks. ‘Oh, Annie!’ she whispered.
‘You found me out, Fran.’ Annie tried to smile.
‘Did Wiggin do this?’
‘I slipped. I slipped and fell awkward against the mantelpiece.’
Frances felt herself turn cold with anger against Wiggin. She went up to her stepmother and led her gently back to bed. ‘Don’t stick up for him,’ she pleaded. ‘Not right now.’
Annie sighed. ‘He had a bottle by the bed. I wanted to take it away from him. I asked him how he came by it.’ Her account began, slow and flat. She was in a state of shock. ‘He got his hand on it first, he held it by the neck and brought it down on my head, just here.’ She pointed with a trembling finger. ‘I must have blacked-out tor a bit. When I came to, he was panicking, trying to pull the old chest across to the door. I got up and out in the nick of time.’
‘Just rest, Annie. Don’t say no more.’ Frances stroked her forehead. ‘I’m so sorry!’ She crooned until the trembling stopped and Annie was able to rest her head on the pillow. ‘Shall I go for the doctor, dear?’
‘No need for that,’ Annie protested. ‘But Wiggin might need him. He’s set on drinking himself to death, I think.’
‘Leave that for now.’ Frances helped Annie to loosen the neck of her blouse and slip between the sheets. ‘Put yourself fir
st for a change.’ She took off her shoes and put them under the bed. ‘I gotta talk to you about Wiggin, Annie.’
‘Later,’ came the faint plea.
‘No, now. You gotta rest and listen to me. I heard a story about him the other day.’
‘Who from?’ Annie turned to look at Frances, pain evident in her tight lips.
‘From Dolly.’
‘Oh, her.’ Annie sighed. ‘You don’t want to take ho notice of what she says.’
‘Maybe not. But I gotta tell you. She went on about how you two met in the first place.’ Frances felt she must go carefully, but go on she must. She blamed herself for not trying to get Annie away from Wiggin soon enough. ‘It was over in Hoxton, I think?’
Annie closed her eyes. ‘I’m tired out, Frances.’
‘I know you are. You had a bad shock.’
‘He ain’t never turned on me before today. Not since he came back. And I don’t think he knew me. I could’ve been anyone getting between him and his next drink.’
‘Don’t make excuses for him, Annie. I can’t bear to hear it.’ Frances smoothed down the sheets and patted them. ‘About this business in Hoxton. Dolly says Wiggin weren’t your first husband after all.’
Tears rolled from the corners of Annie’s closed-eyes. Frances dabbed them with her handkerchief. ‘Don’t tell no one, Fran. Don’t tell Duke.’ She turned her face to the wall, sobbing quietly.
‘I won’t say nothing if you don’t want me to.’ Frances took Annie’s hand in hers and prepared to listen.
‘I was just sixteen, not very old. It’s true, I was married then, before I met Wiggin.’ She opened her eyes and gave Frances a sharp look. ‘Ain’t there nothing Dolly Ogden don’t know?’
Frances smiled. ‘That’s more like it. No, there ain’t, so you’d best own up.’
‘My pa was a cobbler by trade. He mended shoes all his life, and pots and pans when they needed a patch. There was a lot of mouths to feed, and when Michael Kearney came along and offered to take me off their hands, they thought it was a godsend.’ Annie paused. ‘It weren’t, as it turned out, but I couldn’t go back and tell my pa that, could I?’
Frances shook her head. ‘Did he treat you very bad?’
‘He liked a drink, and drink didn’t improve his temper. I stuck it out for a year before I left him.’
‘You left him?’ Frances asked. ‘That ain’t what I heard.’
‘I was married to Kearney for a year,’ Annie insisted. ‘Then I was married to Willie Wiggin.’
‘But how? That’s the real question.’ Frances tried to battle a way through Annie’s evasiveness. Unless they came to the crux, all these painful reminiscences would be for nothing.
‘I think you know the answer to that,’ Annie said slowly. ‘Let’s leave it, Frances. It’s hard enough to hold my head up as it is.’
All Frances’s notions about women’s rights rose to the surface as she considered Annie’s injured face and her struggle to come to terms with the past. She felt another surge of anger. ‘You ain’t done nothing to be ashamed of. Not a single thing. The man who done this to you, that’s the one ought to be hanging his head in shame. And Kearney. Two men who put their heads together and make a bargain over a wife! It’s disgusting.’ Frances couldn’t help but show her feelings, though she was trying to keep a level head for Annie’s sake. ‘Ain’t that what they did? You was Kearney’s wife, and he went and sold you to Wiggin?’
‘They was drunk,’ Annie whispered.
‘And you was seventeen!’ Frances ran out of words to express her disgust.
‘It happened in them days. It was the old way of going on.’
‘But it weren’t the proper way, not even in them days. Ain’t you ever thought it weren’t right, Annie? Ain’t you considered that?’
Annie shook her head. ‘Right or wrong, Wiggin struck a bargain and showed me the piece of paper that made everything open and above board. He said he’d got it from the Register Office and there was no going back on it. Kearney wanted rid of me. Willie took me in. I wore a ring. What could I do?’
‘And what happened to Kearney? Didn’t he sober up and want you back?’
‘Happy ever after? No, he never did get back on his feet. I heard he went on a binge, then he went from bad to worse. He had to go round the builders begging for work, when everyone knew he weren’t fit for nothing. One took him on though, and he was still drunk when he went up a ladder one day. They say he just keeled over and that was it. He fell twenty feet to the ground.’
‘He died?’
Annie nodded. ‘A month after I went with Wiggin. Well, I was in the cart then. Wiggin was no better than Michael Kearney, but I had to stick it out. We got moved on out of Hoxton and we came over to Paradise Court. You know the rest.’
Frances patted her hand. ‘I wish you’d told us.’
‘And be made a laughing stock?’ Annie shook her head. ‘Would you own up to being sold on the market like a bolt of cloth? Be honest, what would you have done?’
‘The same as you, probably. But let’s get one thing straight; you ain’t ever been married to Wiggin, no more than I have. Not in the eyes of the law. That marriage certificate Wiggin said he got from the Register Office, it ain’t worth the paper it’s written on, not without a proper divorce from Kearney.’
Annie considered this, her expression growing agitated. ‘And in the eyes of the Lord?’ she asked.
Frances paused. ‘I ain’t no expert, Annie, but I can’t see that God would object if you said a prayer or two and told him you done your best for Wiggin, but you can’t do no more, and you’ve decided to follow your heart for once and go back where you know you belong.’
‘With Duke?’ Annie trembled.
‘With Pa. You and him should be together, Annie.’
‘He needs me, don’t he?’
‘He does. He’s lost the Duke. That’s what I came to tell you. The brewery want him out. He ain’t gonna fight it, and he ain’t got nowhere to go.’
Annie had her chat with the Almighty, bathed her bruised face in warm water, covered her cut with antiseptic and lint, got dressed and marched with Frances up to the Duke. She spent half an hour with Duke telling him how things stood. First he swore he’d knock Wiggin clean off his feet and got up to do it then and there. Annie restrained him. ‘He’s already flat on his back. Out cold with drink,’ she promised. ‘No, you and me gotta talk.’
Duke was ready to believe every word. ‘You threw yourself away on Wiggin,’ he said. ‘We all knew that.’
‘And for nothing.’ Annie satin her old fireside chair. ‘We was never properly married after all, according to Frances, the law and God Almighty.’
Duke smiled. There was a light in all this. ‘Well, if them three agree, it must be right.’ He leaned forward to take her hand.
‘I never left you for Wiggin, Duke. I left you ’cos I thought we couldn’t be married no more.’
‘But now we can?’
‘I’ve come round to that way of thinking, Duke. Yes. Thanks to Frances.’
‘Thanks to Dolly,’ he reminded her. ‘It was Dolly tipped Frances off and got things moving.’
Annie sniffed. ‘No need to go overboard. We’d never hear the end of it. No, let’s move your things down the court here and now. No grand announcements. They can just get used to me and you being back together, and let them say what they want.’
It was agreed. The furniture, Duke and Ernie would move in with Annie. Hettie arranged to live with Jess and her family in Ealing, which would help in running the shop. Rob made a temporary arrangement to share Walter’s lodgings. Practically, it all made sense.
‘I gotta keep an eye on Willie,’ Annie warned them.
They had to let her follow her own charitable course. But Duke insisted on sending Ernie along with her to Eden House, in case Wiggin turned nasty again. Annie gave in to this pressure. She felt safer in Ernie’s presence; he was good and strong, and slow to anger. He knew his job was
to protect her.
By Friday, 4 July, when Duke should have come before the magistrate, he was ready to leave the pub he’d run for thirty-five years. They crowded out Annie’s tiny terraced house with his and Ernie’s belongings; the old clock with its quarterly chimes, the two fireside chairs, the old kettle.
The Duke stood empty, cloths covering the pumps, the gauze mantels unlit. No sound came from the pianola, no laughter from the drinkers at the bar. Upstairs in the kitchen, a tap dripped, floorboards eased and creaked in the cool night air. Life that had gone on, year in, year out, voices that had filled the rooms had vanished.
Someone would come and cover the walls with new paper, set different slippers in the hearth. The tap dripped into the stone sink, measuring each empty second. Regulars approached the etched and intricate doors, saw no lights, moved on down Duke Street, grumbling about the changes, blaming the brewery for spoiling their weekend pleasure.
Chapter Thirteen
If anything brought home to Hettie the fact that she, Rob, Duke and Ernie had left the pub for good, it was a chance encounter with George Mann on the Monday after the move.
Hettie had a night off from Army work, and was hurrying down Duke Street from the tram stop. She was dressed for the summer evening in a light, wrapover dress in pale blue art silk, with a matching cloche hat pulled well down over her forehead. But every few yards, someone would call out to her; Katie O’Hagan from her haberdashery stall, or Bea Henshaw from the eating-house doorway. Then, when she spotted Ernie on his delivery bike, it was she who waved a loud hello. Her brother jammed on his brakes and stuck out his legs to come to a halt, a broad smile breaking out at the sight of Hettie. She hurried across the busy street towards him.
‘Hello, Ett. You look nice.’ He beamed at her.
Hettie grinned. ‘Thanks, Ern. You don’t look too bad yourself.’ He was dressed up in a smart white collar and tie, in spite of the heat. ‘How’s things?’
Ernie’s smile stayed put. At twenty-eight, he still had the gauche air of a teenaged lad. Sturdily built, with the family’s dark brown eyes, his hair brushed carefully to one side, he still took pride in his job as Henshaw’s errand boy, never putting a foot wrong in his daily deliveries of fresh bread, butter and eggs. ‘Things is fine,’ he told her.
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