It didn’t take her long to figure something out. Telling the trusting Jenny that her mother was very ill, she asked if she could leave her children overnight sometimes, so that she could go to North Pringle Street to let her father get a good night’s sleep. It worked like a charm, but she didn’t try it too often in case Jenny got suspicious.
As Elsie applied her rouge and mascara one evening, she congratulated herself on taking the precaution of getting a Dutch cap fitted again, so there was no risk of falling with a bairn. That would finish her carry-ons, once and for all. Lifting her lipstick now, she outlined a large cupid’s bow and filled it in, grinning as she thought it wouldn’t take long to be kissed off. She didn’t even have to go out tonight; she had invited Paddy Flynn to the house. He was an Irish navvy who had helped with the setting up of Dallachy Aerodrome and laying the runways, and he had stayed on in Buckie, a big rough man with enough blarney to charm the birds off the trees and the kind of blue eyes that made her insides shiver. His black hair was receding at the temples, but what did that matter when he could thrill her like she’d never been thrilled before? If she could risk asking Jenny … he could be here every night and she could tell Lenny Fyfe to get lost.
She had just reached the foot of the stairs when the knock came, and she opened the door with a flourish. ‘Ta-rah!’
‘Holy Mother of God!’ Paddy exclaimed, his eyes popping at the sight of her provocative nightdress. ‘You’d be as well with nothing on.’
‘D’you like it?’ she smirked, pushing her breasts up with her hands.
His answer was to swing her off her feet, carry her upstairs and fling her on the bed. Pausing only to tear off his clothes, he flung himself on her, and the bed was rocking when someone else knocked on the outside door. ‘Don’t answer it,’ Paddy muttered.
A second knock was ignored, and by the third, neither of them could have stopped even if they wanted to, so it also went unheeded.
‘She’s not there, either,’ Jake Berry told Jenny when he returned to the Yardie.
Cuddling a crimson-faced, screaming child, her own face white, Jenny burst out, ‘Where is she? Wee Norma’s not any better, what’ll I do?’
‘Will I go for the doctor?’
‘It’s maybe nothing, and I know bairns are up and down, but it’s not so bad when they’re your own. Yes, you’d better get the doctor, Jake, it’s better to be safe than sorry.’
Pacing the floor in an effort to pacify the unpacifiable baby, she felt angry with Elsie. She’d said she was going to see her mother, but her father had told Jake she hadn’t been there, and she wasn’t at home either. Surely she wasn’t out gallivanting at this time of night? ‘Hush, my pet,’ Jenny soothed the roaring bundle. ‘Hush now.’
It was only minutes until Dr Mathieson came in, though it seemed like hours to the anxious young woman, and after examining the infant, he smiled. ‘It’s just colic. Have you any gripe water in the house?’
‘I think there’s still some in the press.’ She looked rather stunned. ‘Colic, is that all it is? Lizann had colic, and Georgie when he was a baby, and they weren’t half as bad as this. Of course, Norma’s not mine, and we can’t find her mother, that’s why I panicked.’
‘Well, there’s nothing to worry about. The gripe water should settle her and she’ll be asleep in no time.’
‘I’m sorry I bothered you, doctor,’ Jenny murmured, tendering the half-crown he usually charged.
He waved it away. ‘It’s what I’m there for, my dear.’
When Dr Mathieson went out, Jake said, ‘I bet that’s a relief. Will I hold her till you get the gripe water?’
Only half an hour later, Jenny was able to go to bed. Norma was tucked up beside Lizann, both sound asleep, and everything was peaceful again. But as she waited for sleep to claim her, she decided not to let Elsie off with the lie she had told.
It was seven o’clock the following morning, and none of the children were up when Elsie walked in, a beaming smile on her face – Paddy Flynn hadn’t left her until half past six. The smile annoyed Jenny more than ever. ‘I’m glad you’re pleased with yourself,’ she said sarcastically, ‘for I was up half the night with your Norma.’
‘Oh God, what happened? Is she all right?’
‘She is now, but where were you? You said you were going to sit with your mother, but when I sent Jake Berry to get you, your father told him you hadn’t been there at all.’
Terrified that Jake had found out everything, Elsie said, ‘Did my dad say anything about my mother? How she was?’
‘I don’t suppose Jake asked. I sent him to your house after that, but you weren’t there either. I hate being told lies, Elsie, and I’m not putting up with it. I’m not keeping your bairns to let you stay out all night with men and you needn’t think it.’
Elsie had never thought so quickly in her life. ‘I’m sorry, Jenny,’ she began. ‘I was getting ready to go to my mother when I … took awful pains in my stomach, I was doubled up wi’ them, and then the diarrhoea started.’
‘You’ve got over it awful quick.’
‘I’d some mixture I got at the chemist a while back, and that stopped it, though it was two in the morning before I got to my bed.’
Jenny was weakening, but there was still something not explained. ‘So you’d still been up when Jake was there? Why didn’t you answer the door? He said he knocked three times.’
‘Oh, it was him, was it? I was in the lavvy, you see, and nobody was there by the time I got to the door. I wondered who it had been, but I never thought … Oh, Jenny, I’m sorry you’ve had all the worry.’
Satisfied now, Jenny smiled. ‘It wasn’t your fault. I did get a scare, though, for Norma wouldn’t stop screaming. That’s why I made Jake go for the doctor. I’d better get the boys wakened now. It’s time your Pattie was getting ready for school.’
When the Taits left, Jenny got her own two washed and dressed then started on the housework, her mind still on what had happened. She’d often had doubts about Elsie’s nights with her sick mother, had even wondered if the woman really was sick, but now she had doubts about her doubts. Peter’s wife might not be perfect, but she loved her bairns; she wouldn’t palm them off on anybody else so she could be with a man.
She had misjudged Elsie, Jenny concluded, and she’d have to be extra nice to her in future to make up for it.
Elsie deemed it best not to push her luck with Jenny, who had hit home with her suspicions on the morning after Norma’s colic. Although she had been fobbed off that time, trying it again would just be asking for trouble. But, Elsie told herself, she couldn’t stop seeing Paddy Flynn. He was the best thing that had ever happened to her.
Burning her boats altogether, she told him that he could sleep with her twice a week until she saw how things went, as long as he was gone before her sons woke up. If Pattie saw him, he would think nothing of telling Rosie Mac or Jenny or whoever he happened to be speaking to that there had been a strange man in his mam’s bed.
‘Of course,’ she reminded the Irishman, ‘you’ll have to stay away when Peter’s on leave, but that shouldn’t be for a long time yet.’
The arrangement worked very well, Elsie discovered, because her three children slept like logs and never heard a thing, not even when she and her lover got carried away in their passion. Only one thing niggled at her – she had no qualms about deceiving Peter, but it didn’t feel right to deceive Paddy by keeping Lenny as a stand-by.
The next time the young man arrived, therefore, she waited until he was leaving. ‘We’d better stop this, Lenny. We’ve been at it for years now, and somebody might …’
He looked at her in disbelief. ‘You’re not finishing with me, Elsie?’
‘It’s the best way, lover-boy,’ she murmured, finding it easier as he swallowed each lie. ‘There’s nothing in it for you. You should find yourself a nice girl and get married.’
‘I don’t want anybody else. I love you.’
‘And I lov
e you, but …’ She stopped and stroked his cheek. Was she being stupid? She did think a lot of him – loved him, in a way – but Paddy was the strong man she had always been looking for, and if he found out about Lenny he’d never come back. ‘It’s better this way, Len. It would be awful if we carried on till you got tired of me.’
‘I’ll never get tired of you,’ he vowed. ‘Oh, Elsie, please …?’
Realizing, with an inward shudder, that it was more likely to be Paddy who would tire of her, she decided to hedge her bets. ‘Give it a try, eh? Just for a while? It’ll do us both good, put some new life into us.’
Still not convinced, he sighed. ‘Okay. But just for a wee while.’
Her fervent kiss sent him home sure that it would all work out.
* * *
Elsie could have screamed when she read Peter’s letter. He’d said he would be away for about a year, and it wasn’t much more than two months. With a heavy heart, she waited for Paddy to appear that night. ‘Peter’ll be home at the end of this week,’ she told him, ‘so I won’t be able to see you till he goes back.’
The big man didn’t look at all pleased, and to sweeten him she added, ‘Once he’s away, you could be here more than twice a week.’
‘Would you let me sleep with you every night, mavourneen?’
‘Aye, why not?’ she said, recklessly. ‘You can bide here if you want.’
‘I’ll hold you to that,’ he grinned. ‘How long will he be at home?’
‘He didn’t say, but I tell you what. I’ll leave my front room curtains open to let you know he’s gone. You’ll just have to keep coming past and watching for my signal.’
Exhausted after the long journey from Portsmouth – which he wouldn’t have made if it hadn’t been for his children – Peter slept like a log on his first night home, but after a week of being cramped on the parlour couch he longed for the freedom to stretch his long legs, the comfort of a proper bed. On board the corvette he had to be ready to jump any minute in the short spells in his bunk, but he didn’t need to make a martyr of himself at home. Why shouldn’t he sleep with Elsie? She seemed to be indifferent to him now, hadn’t tried any of her old tricks on him.
When he told her in the morning that he had decided to share her bed again, he made it quite clear that he would stand no nonsense from her and that she needn’t expect anything of him. Late that night, however, after she had gone upstairs, he sat by the dying fire wondering if he could trust himself. He knew how the heat of her soft body would affect him, the appealing curve of her back.
He turned his mind desperately to something which had been niggling at him for some time. He’d thought about it a lot, remembering how utterly devastated Elsie had been on the night after Jenny Jappy’s baby was born … the night after Hannah had died. Died? It seemed to him that his wife wouldn’t have been so badly affected by an ordinary death, sudden though it was. Not only sudden – providential, as far as Elsie was concerned. Every time she was at the Yardie she must have been scared that the old woman would come out with what she had been told and, pressed as to who had told her about Lizann’s disappearance, she would name Elsie.
Jumping to his feet, he climbed the stairs. His suspicions had no real substance, but he had to prove or disprove them.
Elsie, obviously sure that his defences would fall, smiled seductively when he went into the bedroom, but he didn’t respond to her. ‘Tell me again what you said to Hannah about Lizann going away.’
Elsie tutted testily. ‘Why are you digging that up again? It was ages ago, and she’d forgotten all about it. She thought Jenny was Lizann.’
‘I still want you to remind me.’
Annoyed at him for destroying what she thought would be a night of love, and irritated that he had interrupted her affair with Paddy, his wife took no time to cast her mind back to her previous confession. ‘I told her I’d made Lizann run away.’
Peter’s gut twisted but he had to be certain. She hadn’t admitted this before, but he had better gentle her along until he learned the truth. ‘What was it you said to her?’
Too late, Elsie realized her error and tried to correct it. ‘Oh, no, I mind now. I said somebody must have made Lizann run away.’
‘I’m more inclined to believe your first answer,’ he said, dryly.
‘No, that’s the gospel truth.’
His stomach muscles tightened. ‘You’re lying! Tell me exactly what you said to Hannah!’
Fear of what he might uncover made Elsie tell another untruth. ‘That first time, I just said Lizann had ran off, but the night Jenny’s baby was born and I was putting the old wife to her bed, I said … it was me that made her leave.’
Diving over and grabbing her by the throat, Peter shook her so hard that her head wobbled and her teeth rattled. ‘So it was you! What did you do, you bitch? Tell me, for God’s sake!’
‘Let me go!’ She tried to struggle free, but Peter had her in a grip of steel, and in her anger she spat out the truth. ‘I told Lizann to stop asking you to her house, or I’d …’
‘She never asked me there, you bloody fool!’ Peter roared. ‘I went to her … as a friend, though I loved her as much as any man could love a woman. But come on, what else did you say to her?’
Elsie tried to excuse herself. ‘I didna ken she would run away, I was just … warning her to let you alone, or …’
‘You threatened her?’
‘I said if she didna stop seeing you, I’d tell the whole o’ Buckie she’d been taking up wi’ you for years and years.’
‘Christ almighty, woman! She’d not long lost her husband and her baby, and you said that to her? She must have been out of her mind with … no wonder she went away.’
‘I didna mean it! I just wanted to get you to myself again.’
At last he had learned why Lizann had left, but it was small comfort to him now, and he said icily, ‘You never had me in the first place!’
‘How can you say that? My body used to be sore from the times …’
He flung her from him and straightened his back. ‘Yes, Elsie, your body had me, I can’t deny that, but Lizann always had my heart, and even if I never see her again I’ll love her till the day I die.’
Peter became wrapped up in his own thoughts. If Elsie had told people that he was unfaithful to her – and she would have done if Lizann hadn’t gone away, exaggerating out of spite – he could have lost his job, which meant everything to him then. Lizann would have realized that and, even though she was completely innocent of the accusation, she had left to save him being publicly shamed. She wouldn’t care about herself, but she had cared enough for him to try to protect him.
Wishing that she had waited and told him about Elsie’s threat, Peter was more glad than ever that he had joined up. He could never forgive Elsie for driving Lizann away, and if he’d still been coming home every weekend it would have meant endless fights between them.
His anger at her bubbling up again, he said, ‘God, I could kill you for what you did.’
‘Carry on,’ she sneered, sure that he wouldn’t. ‘It’ll nae bring your darling Lizann back.’
Having to admit to himself that this at least was true, he remembered what had prompted him to embark on his interrogation in the first place. He still hadn’t learned what he wanted to know, just enough to make his mind go round and round, but not in circles. It was on a spiral course, driving him inexorably towards a crucial point, a point he felt himself shying away from. Skirting round it, he muttered, ‘You told Hannah that on the night Jenny had her baby?’
Fighting against the discovery of her greatest crime, Elsie said, as plaintively as she could, ‘She was getting right up my back wi’ what she was saying.’
‘When you were putting her to bed?’
‘And her fighting against me all the time.’
‘She died that same night?’
There was something in the way he was looking at her that told Elsie she was on treacherous ground, so she b
lustered, ‘She was sleeping when I left her.’
‘Was she?’ He had started out with only a sliver of suspicion, but her fidgeting hands and the fear in her eyes made him certain that he wasn’t far off the mark. ‘Are you trying to tell me she died from shock? Or did you do something to shut her up for good?’
Her pupils dilating, she shrank against the pillows without admitting anything … nor denying, and bile rose in his throat. How could he have married this poor excuse for a woman? He felt no anger, no pity, just a desperate need to get away from her. She had taken spite at him out on a grieving young widow, then on a defenceless old invalid. Furthermore, he was positive she had been the cause of Hannah’s death, however she had done it, but nobody would believe him – and the one person he must never tell was Mick Jappy. If he knew what Elsie had done to his sister and his mother, he would kill her … and he’d be the one to swing from the end of the rope.
‘What are you going to do?’ Elsie quavered, as he stepped back.
‘I should report you to the police,’ he barked.
She flung out her arms in appeal. ‘You’ll not tell them? Think about Pattie and Tommy and Norma.’
‘It’s them I am thinking about,’ he said, quietly. ‘I just hope your conscience never lets you rest. You’ve as good as murdered Hannah, and I feel like throttling you for what you did to Lizann, but I can’t deprive the children of their mother.’
Her patent relief turned his stomach. ‘When I walk out of here, I’ll never come back, though it’ll break my heart not to see my sons again.’
Peter had expected her to become cocksure again at being let off the hook, and he was astonished when she said gently, ‘You’re welcome to come and see them as often as you like. They’ll want to see you.’
The Girl with the Creel Page 36