Chrissie's Children

by Irene Carr

  At the end of the evening, when they were all about to take their leave, Davenport shook Tourville’s hand, admitting defeat. ‘So you don’t expect to find anything you want here?’

  Chrissie was aware of Randolph Tourville’s eyes on her again as he replied, ‘You never know,’ and she knew he was attracted to her.

  She slept badly that night and it was days before she could put the man out of her mind.

  Sarah Tennant hurried, almost running, along Herbert Street, passing through a succession of pools of yellow light cast by the streetlamps. The wind brought the rain in from the sea, but she had a winter coat now – secondhand, well worn and too big, but warm. She carried two baskets of shopping, bought in the covered market just before the stalls closed, when they sold off stock cheaply.

  She paused as she pushed open the front door and stepped into the passage. One low-powered bulb shed a meagre light and filled the corners with shadows. The cheap linoleum covering the floor was slick with water and mud, and reflected the light dully. Sarah set down the baskets, wiped rain from her face and tossed back her wet hair. As she picked up the baskets again, Joshua Fannon stepped out of the shadows and waddled heavily along the passage to meet her. He wheezed, ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

  Sarah held the baskets in front of her like a shield between her and Fannon. She used them to hold him off and pushed past him, hurrying on to the end of the passage and the door into the Tennants’ kitchen. Once inside she put down the baskets, took the rent book from a drawer and told her mother, sitting by the fire, ‘I’m just going to pay the rent.’

  She found Fannon had retreated to the far end of the passage again and now waited by the front door. Sarah went to him, took her purse from her damp pocket and counted out the six shillings and sixpence. Fannon took it, entered the amount in the book and initialled it with his fountain pen. Sarah reached out for the book but he held it against his chest. ‘You got behind wi’ the rent last winter.’

  ‘It’s up to date now.’ Sarah held out her hand. ‘Give me the book, please.’

  Fannon ignored that, and gripped her arm with a damp hand, warning, ‘If that happens again you might need a friend to keep a roof over your heads.’ He smiled, face oily with sweat. ‘And nothing’s lost that’s given to a friend.’

  He tried to fondle her, but then a door opened upstairs and a neighbour clattered out on to the landing. Fannon’s attention was distracted for a moment. Sarah seized her chance and the rent book, tore away from him and ran back into the kitchen.

  Fannon swore as the door slammed behind her. He lumbered out of the house and set off along the street, buttoning his raincoat.

  When he got home he found a familiar scene. Meggie was slumped and snoring, mouth sagging open, in her armchair by the fire. An empty bottle and a half-empty glass stood on the floor beside her and the room stank of gin.

  Fannon cursed her under his breath as he spilled the money he had collected out of the pockets of his raincoat on to the table. He muttered, ‘You can check it yourself and bank it, you cow.’ She always did Joshua Fannon knew there had to be a bank book in the house but he had never been able to find it. He went to the fire and warmed his hands – and himself at the thought of Sarah. He only had to wait his time.

  Sarah stared into her almost empty purse. The shopping and the rent had taken the last of her mother’s savings and nearly all the wages paid to Sarah that afternoon. A young girl was paid less than a grown woman, and the law said she could not be allowed to work overtime, that the number of her working hours was restricted. Sarah faced the fact that she and her mother needed more money.

  She knew only one way to make it.

  5

  February 1936

  A month later, on a day of grey sky and driving rain, Chrissie took the train to Yorkshire and Jack’s old school. Her dark eyes apprehensive, she sat in the headmaster’s study with its photographs of cricket XIs and rugger XVs and listened to the Head: ‘. . . Good of you to come . . .’ That was purely courtesy: he had sent for her. Or one of them, and Jack could not leave the yard because he was awaiting the visit of a Brazilian millionaire, hoping for an order from him to build a ship. Chrissie had left the running of the Railway Hotel to Dinsdale Arkley and come to face the music.

  The Head’s message was not new, it had been spelled out in successive term end reports, but now it was more forceful: Matt was not keeping up. Chrissie sat in the aroma of chalk dust and leather and listened to the droning of the Head against the background of a slow-ticking longcase clock, its pendulum swinging inside its glass door. A cane, long and whippy, stood in a corner.

  ‘He reads a great deal and draws well . . . Only works enough to keep out of immediate trouble . . . A rebel, might be a very good wing three-quarter but—’ and shocked now – he doesn’t try . . . didn’t want to play for the school First Fifteen this afternoon, I had to order him . . . Not a good advertisement for the school.’

  Chrissie listened to the accusations and sighed inside herself for her son, Oh, Matt, my baby.

  Chrissie promised the Head, ‘I’ll talk to him, take him into the town for tea, if that is all right?’ It was a request made out of courtesy.

  The Head acknowledged it, ‘By all means.’ He then went on, ‘We do not want to lose him, he is a good boy and his morals and manners are not in question, but he is not learning here.’ He paused, then summed up: ‘He is drifting.’ Chrissie had heard that before, from Jack.

  She walked out into the afternoon with the Head and put up her umbrella against the drizzle. The crowding boys hastily made room for them on the duckboards laid along the side of the pitch and Chrissie, huddled in her long winter overcoat, watched the game and her son. Her feet, in their neat, black glacé court shoes that had cost her two guineas, grew steadily colder. She told herself she should have worn wellingtons, as she would usually when she went to a match, as she had when she was first married and watched Jack play.

  Matt had been changing, pulling his jersey over his head and reaching for his boots, when his captain came to stand over him, asking, ‘Are you sure you’re all right to play?’

  Matt had looked up as he tugged on laces, ‘’Course I am. Why?’

  ‘Well, you said you couldn’t turn out.’

  Matt had explained patiently, ‘I said I didn’t want to play, not that I couldn’t.’ He had been pulled in because the two boys who were first choice and reserve for the position had both been injured. Matt had moved on from reading the adventures of The Saint and Bulldog Drummond and was now deep into Hugh Walpole and Thackeray, and did not want to leave them to play football. His captain had not understood that at all and went away baffled and outraged.

  Chrissie understood the game well enough to realise after only a few minutes that her son’s heart was not in it. The ball was greasy with mud so it was not surprising that he dropped a pass or two, but he looked awkward and ill at ease. Matt was tall for a winger and now seemed clumsy, all arms and legs. Chrissie thought with a pang of sympathy that he looked miserable.

  He was. And bad tempered. He had not wanted to be out here, freezing on the wing, a spectator except when he failed to hold a pass. Then his peers on the touchline groaned, ‘Oh, come on, Ballantyne!’

  At half-time they were losing eight points to nil. His captain trudged through the mud to where Matt stood alone sucking on a slice of lemon and told him, ‘You’ve got to buck up and get into the game.’

  Matt glared at him and snapped, ‘I can’t get into it if I don’t get the bloody ball!’

  ‘You’re a wash-out.’ The captain glared at him and walked away.

  Matt turned his back on his team and found himself facing the crowd on the touchline. His captain, his team and the gang over there could think what they liked. He didn’t care. Then he saw his mother, standing under an umbrella in the thick of the crowd where she would hear all the jibes they hurled at him.

  She saw his start of recognition, waved and smiled. Then it
was time to restart the game.

  He lined up with the others, and now the situation had changed. He didn’t care what they thought about him, but he wouldn’t have them running him down in the presence of his mother. He would show them. So when his opposite number took a pass and raced down the wing, Matt felled him with a crunching tackle that left the boy winded. Matt started yelling at his forwards, urging them on, and calling for the ball. But he did not get it. It was passed out to the other wing with monotonous regularity, and with equal regularity somebody in the centre failed to hold it and the movement broke down.

  The game raged up and down the field, and with ten minutes to go one of the opposition broke through the defence, sidestepped the full-back and made for the line. Matt chased and caught him, bringing him down only feet short of scoring. The touchline crowd cheered him then, but he was oblivious to it. The scrum was formed and the ball was won by the opposing side. Matt watched it bobble through the booted feet churning the mud and he caught the glance the other team’s scrum-half threw at the winger facing Matt, so when the ball came out Matt was already running. He cut between the scrum-half and the winger as the former passed to the latter, intercepted the ball and snatched it out of the air – then he was running.

  The opposing fly-half charged across and Matt fooled him with a change of pace that left him toiling along behind. The awkwardness was gone and he was running flat out now, graceful and balanced. He covered the length of the field, swerved around the full-back and scored under the posts. His captain kicked the goal.

  They restarted with only five minutes to play. Four minutes later the ball was passed out along the line of three-quarters. Matt guessed what would happen, abandoned his position and ran across the field, looping behind the line. When the ball was dropped he swooped on it and scooped it up one-handed on the halfway line. He outran two men, swerved and jinked past two more and hurled himself over to score under the posts again. Again his captain kicked the easy goal. They had won. Matt looked across to the touchline and saw his mother jumping up and down excitedly. He laughed, happy now.

  Chrissie gave him a substantial high tea in the restaurant of the Red Lion. She told him why she was there, eyeing him severely, and then asked, apprehensive, ready to wince herself: ‘Do they beat you?’

  He blinked at her. ‘What?’

  ‘The headmaster has a cane in his study, a wicked-looking thing.’

  Matt laughed, ‘No! The old boy is dead set against that sort of thing. We think he keeps it there for show, in case some parents think he isn’t strict enough.’

  ‘Oh!’ Chrissie was relieved at that, anyway. ‘Well, your father will be pleased when I tell him about the game, but as to the rest . . .’

  Matt’s thin face lengthened as he became serious. ‘The Head read you the lesson, didn’t he?’ He sighed, ‘Look, Mother, I don’t deliberately laze about and skip work. It’s just that I keep finding other things I’d rather do. But I promise you, I will try.’ He meant it.

  Chrissie slipped a half-crown into his hand as she climbed into the train.

  ‘I’ll try,’ Peter Robinson had told his mother when he set out before dawn. He hauled his bogey down to the shore and collected sea coal from the high tide line. He hawked the coal around the streets then went back to collect more. He finally dragged the bogey home empty when it was past sunset. The lamplighter was going around the streets with his long pole, a loop on the end, switching on the lights. Peter was weary but happy, with a few shillings in his pocket.

  Men were spilling out of the yards that still had work, finished for the day, a sea of bobbing caps. As Peter passed Ballantyne’s he saw Billy Hackett, his seven-year-old half-brother, begging at the gate: ‘Got any bait left, mister, please?’ ‘Bait’ was the sandwich lunch a workman took to the yard.

  Peter seized Billy by the scruff of his neck, but gently. He remembered when he had begged for food in the same way when he was Billy’s age. He still ticked off the boy: ‘Your mother would cry her eyes out if she saw you doing that, and if I catch you at it again you’ll get belted.’

  Billy didn’t believe that, although he saw Peter was serious in his warning, and went with him, protesting, ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘You’re always hungry.’ Peter ruffled Billy’s hair, already cut short so it stood up like a clothes brush. Then he saw Gallagher and McNally in the crowd coming out of the yard. He hesitated, then remembered what Joe Nolan had said and chose discretion. He steered Billy on to the other side of the road and down a side street.

  Billy demanded, ‘Where are we going?’

  Peter told him, ‘To get some fish and chips.’

  ‘Great!’

  Peter bought two ‘tuppenny lots’ – a penny fish and a pennyworth of chips in each. He and Billy took them home to Margaret Hackett and shared them out between the three of them, filling up with bread and margarine.

  Peter went to bed content. He would go picking coal again next day.

  Chrissie had to change trains at Durham. She was in no hurry for her dinner after high tea with Matt, so she left the station and walked down the hill into the ancient town. Tommy Johnson, Dinsdale Arkley’s predecessor as manager of her hotel, lived in Durham now. He had moved to a little house near the station after he retired. Chrissie took the opportunity to visit an old friend.

  Tommy and his wife made her welcome and wanted to feed her again but Chrissie laughingly refused the food they urged on her and settled for a cup of tea. She spent a pleasant hour with them, talking of old times: how she had first met Tommy when she was a young barmaid, and later bought the hotel. Tommy said, ‘You saved my life then. That’s no exaggeration. The feller that owned the place was going to sell up and it was a certainty the one that wanted to buy it would have sacked me. I’d never have got another job like that at my age and the worry would ha’ killed me.’ His wife put her arms around Chrissie and kissed her.

  It was late in the evening when Chrissie walked up the hill to the station. A stocky, broad-shouldered man carrying a small suitcase preceded her. As they came to the foot of the last steep bank another man stepped out of the shadows and appealed to the stocky man, ‘Carry your case up to the station, sir?’

  The stocky man brushed past him and said, not unkindly, ‘No, lad, I can manage this meself. Mebbe better than you can,’ because the other appeared sunken cheeked and hollow eyed in the harsh light from the streetlamps, and walked with a limp.

  Chrissie stared at the disappointed man for a long second, not wanting to believe the evidence of her eyes, thinking she must be mistaken. Then he glanced her way and she saw him flinch with shock as he recognised her. Chrissie said, ‘Hello, Phillip.’

  Phillip Massingham started to turn away but Chrissie caught his arm and held him. The arm felt thin as a stick in her grasp. For some seconds they were silent. Chrissie did not know where to start. She said, ‘What are you doing here?’ then stopped, because the answer was obvious. He was trying to earn a few coppers by carrying the cases of passengers up the long haul to the station. She amended: ‘I mean, I thought you were in America. Elsie wrote to me . . .’

  Phillip tried to turn away and avoided her gaze. He muttered, ‘I suppose she told you I’d made a mess of things and run out on her.’

  ‘No!’ Chrissie tugged him around to face her again. ‘She said you’d been ill and very noble, gone off so you wouldn’t be a burden. I don’t think it was noble. I think it was bloody silly. So – ’ she drew a breath – ‘how did you get here?’

  He still would not look at her, but he answered, in jerky sentences as if the words were forced out of him, ‘There’s millions on the road over there. A lot die alongside the railroad tracks. Or in the hobo jungles, places where they sleep on the outside of towns, under a bridge or a tree. I was on my own and the States was a foreign country to me. I wanted to come home. A skipper of a ship let me work my passage and put me ashore at Glasgow. After that I walked or got lifts, heading south, but I’ve been here for th
ree weeks. I remembered the people around here were kind to me before – years ago, when I met you. So I stayed, I thought I’d build up my strength.’ He had paused after every muttered sentence and there was a longer pause now. Then: ‘I had nowhere to go anyway . . .’ He petered out and stood silent, patient, beaten.

  Chrissie swallowed then linked her arm through his and urged him into shambling motion, heading up the hill. ‘Come on. I’m not letting you go now I’ve found you – and by a miracle.’

  He went along with her, unquestioning except when she bought his ticket at the booking office and he asked, ‘Where are we going?’

  Chrissie had foreseen this and answered, ‘To find you a bed for the night.’

  He tried to pull away then, saying, ‘I don’t want to go to your home.’

  ‘You’re not. Don’t worry.’ Chrissie had guessed he would prefer anonymity to the Ballantyne house with its curious adolescents.

  She took him to the Railway Hotel, installed him in a room and had a meal sent up on a tray. While he was eating that she took a taxi home and brought back a set of Jack’s pyjamas and a dressing gown. Back at the hotel she took away Phillip’s clothes and threw them out.

  Next day Jack went with her to buy some new ones for Massingham. ‘Poor devil,’ he said. ‘Wonder how long it will take for him to get back on his feet again?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Chrissie answered. ‘He needs a long rest and feeding up.’

  Jack nodded, recalling Phillip’s gaunt face. ‘And some work, some aim in life. That’s just as important for a man like him.’

  Chrissie thought she knew the answer to that, but she waited a week, putting off the moment, before she finally took the plunge and telephoned long distance to London. After she had got past two layers of secretaries: ‘This is Chrissie Ballantyne. Do you remember me, Mr Tourville?’

  His deep voice came down the crackling wire. ‘I remember you well.’ Chrissie could picture his smile, confident. ‘Very well . . .’