Orphan of Angel Street (13 page)

The two of them, and Mercy, spent that evening trying to comfort first Susan – ‘How could she go and leave us?’ she sobbed, hurt to the very core. ‘She’s my Mom! And to go with that idiot of a bloke . . .’ and then Mary Jones, who was almost hysterical with panic.

‘How’m I going to manage? We can barely afford to eat as it is! How could ’e? If I ever see ’im again – or ’er – I’ll kill the pair of ’em with my bare hands.’ Her youngest child lay suckling at her tiny breast as she sat sobbing and sniffing. ‘Oh Elsie, what in heaven am I going to do? I’ll have to move back in with me mom in ’er one room – we’ll be in the workhouse else!’

‘No.’ Elsie’s jaw was set and determined. ‘You won’t have to do that, I’ll see to it.’

Bummy, stood in the doorway, hoiked his trousers up from behind with one hand and nodded in agreement. ‘Terrible that is, the Parish. D’you remember?’

Elsie nodded curtly. Of course she remembered. The time when they had five young ones, Maryann, Frank, Josephine, Cathleen and Lena, the one they’d lost soon after from diphtheria. Bummy had injured his back so badly that for weeks, months, he couldn’t work. He’d lain helpless, watching his vibrant, copper-haired wife exhaust herself.

Finally Elsie went to the local Board of Guardians, timidly asking for help. She was given a weekly allowance of bread but she would never forget the terror and humiliation of it, the rude personal questions, the hard, mistrusting eyes of the people on the board. It was such a degrading time in her life, a reminder of the power others could have over her. Even now she felt panic and disgust thinking of it.

As Bummy had recovered with agonizing slowness, Elsie vowed she would never let herself or anyone else she could save from it have to put themselves at the mercy of the Parish again.

She leant over and took Mary’s hand.

‘Don’t fret. I’ve got Johnny and Tom out at work now as well as the girls. And there’s Mercy and Susan, though God knows they’ve got the rent to keep up on their own now. But we’ll all rally round – I’ll make sure of that.

If Elsie said they were going to give help to Mary, then Mercy and Susan were going to do as she said.

‘We ought to,’ Susan said. ‘After all, it’s my mom who’s caused her all this trouble.’

‘The one thing she’s good at,’ Mercy retorted.

Susan was now earning rather well. Mercy had gone round for her putting cards in shop windows, and she found new customers. Sewing for the poor brought in a very small trickle of money, but far more lucrative was the trade from Dorothy. The clothes she bought for Susan to mend were of much higher quality, sometimes they were awed by the sight of them. Dorothy made sure she was handsomely paid. One week Susan made as much as twelve shillings!

Her confidence was growing and her customers were happy too.

‘Imagine if they could see where their clothes are going!’ Dorothy said to Grace, holding up a cream satin evening gown with lace straps and underskirt. Its owner wanted it taken in over the hips.

Grace was barely listening. They were standing in the small dressing room which extended off Grace and Neville Weston’s comfortable bedchamber. Grace seemed to stare through Dorothy, her expression troubled.

‘What is it?’ Dorothy asked gently.

Grace looked into her eyes. ‘I can’t bear it, thinking of her there, in that terrible place!’

If her life had proceeded as her stern, fiercely religious father had planned, Grace’s only awareness of the conditions of the slum courtyards, the raucous life of the poor, would have been no more than snatched glimpses as she swept past in a carriage to the centre of Birmingham. The life Mercy was leading, the struggles against poverty and squalor, would have been so distant from her as to be unimaginable.

She could hardly bear to think of her desperate time as ‘Lily’. It was an abyss in her experience, those days which had denied her her name, her class, her normally comfortable life, her very sense of self. She had for a short time lived and been part of that other alien life in the wilderness. She recalled even now in her dreams the damp, bug-ridden walls, the fetid smells, the awful sense of enforced intimacy with others. And the terror of that lonely birth. Its memory was all the more horrific in its contrast with her other life. As soon as she could stand after the birth she had fled from it, imagining it would then be over, something she could close the door on as soon as she walked away from the Joseph Hanley Home.

Yet she had not forseen its consequences, that she would never escape the hold those memories had on her, or the tiny child she had brought forth.

‘It’s worse now!’ Her voice cracked. ‘Now we’ve found her – knowing where she is again. At least while she was lost to us we knew nothing, and could do nothing, except hope. And she’s older now . . . I find this present situation . . .’

She turned away, gliding into her bedchamber, a lace handkerchief pressed to her face as her shoulders heaved.

‘It’s unbearable!’ Dorothy heard her voice, barely more than a whisper. She saw Grace struggle to compose herself, as she had done so many times over the years, hearing about Mercy when she was at the Hanley Home. She bent her immaculately coiffured head, two golden plaits coiled low behind her ears.

‘Dorothy—’ She turned, eyes full of tears, appealing to her friend across the white linen of the bed. ‘I don’t know if I can endure it any more.’

Dorothy went to her quickly, putting her hands on Grace’s shoulders. ‘Of course you can, Grace, my dear one – you can. You have to be strong for the boys, and you’ve been so brave until now. The child’s a beauty – the image of you. She’s fourteen now. If you can just be sure of that position for her . . . Just keep yourself together. Good can come of all this, I’m sure of it.’

There was a pause, and both women heard footsteps. Grace pulled her expression into one approaching composure. ‘You’d better go. Neville’s coming up to change.’

As she spoke, the door opened abruptly.

‘Oh – you’re here again, are you?’ Neville said to Dorothy, pushing past her into the room.

Grace’s eyes met Dorothy’s, urgently entreating her to leave. Dorothy slipped quietly from the room.

‘Forever hanging about, that one, isn’t she?’ Neville was full of irritation. He sat on the bed pulling his boots off. ‘Gets on my nerves.’

‘I’m sorry, dear.’ Grace spoke in a quiet, even voice, unfastening her hair in front of the mirror. ‘I wasn’t expecting you up quite so soon. Did you have a pleasant day?’ Weston’s was Neville’s family firm, providing lighting for the railways.

‘Pleasant? You think work is pleasant, do you?’ He watched his wife from behind, the gentle curve of her hips, that eternal smooth neatness of hers. By God, how he hungered for a woman with hot blood in her veins!

Seeing him watching her in the glass, Grace turned and attempted a bright smile. Neville ignored her, got up and stumped into the dressing room.

Downstairs, Dorothy thought of the two of them up there, her mouth pulled down in a hard grimace. She had always loathed Neville, had a flesh-creeping distaste for his stocky body, red cheeks and thick brown hair which sat on top of his head with the unsettled look of a wig. Add to that his selfishness and boorishness and Dorothy burned with protective indignation on Grace’s behalf, trapped as she was in her life with this ox of a man.

Grace tried to keep up at least the appearance of a civilized marriage, if not a happy one.

‘Never mind,’ she had said to Dorothy on many occasions. ‘I have all I need. I have you and I have my children.

If it hadn’t been for Susan’s pain over her desertion by her mother, Mercy would have been almost completely happy. She was free of Mabel, could organize the place how she wanted and had kind neighbours. There were Dorothy’s visits, every week or two and Mercy had begun to feel she belonged somewhere. No one had set eyes on Mabel or Stan.

Between them, she and Susan were at last making the inside of the house more homely. Mabel, in a perverse way, had refused even to have the rotten stair tread mended, something she and Mercy were constantly having rows about.

‘Mr Pepper could fix that soon as winking,’ Mercy kept saying. ‘I’m fed up with nearly falling through it all the time.’

‘We don’t need the likes of ’im coming in ’ere,’ Mabel would snarl. ‘We’ll live with it, that’s what we’ll do.’

‘You’d cut off your own nose to spite yer face, wouldn’t you?’ Mercy snapped, exasperated. She could never get to grips with Mabel’s odd combination of self-indulgence and self-punishment.

Now she’d gone, Mercy had had Bummy Pepper in straight away and they had a nice new tread. And bit by bit she was picking up a few bits of furniture: an old settle which Mercy polished until it was a smooth, rich colour, a little cupboard for their few crocks, a comfortable chair for Susan to rest by the fire, and Susan had botched two peg rugs, using old pieces of hessian and scraps of material. They were bright and colourful and covered some of the worst wear on the bricks. Now she was working on some curtains.

The job at Wrigley’s Bakery was straightforward enough. Every morning Mercy helped Susan get up. They’d long perfected the art of getting her downstairs. She took Susan in the wheelchair to Elsie’s house where she did most of her work.

‘I’ll bring yer a doughnut!’ Mercy sometimes called cheerfully as she set off and Elsie would reply, ‘Make it a bagful!’

She walked into town with Tom and Johnny. No longer did she have to hobble along in poorly fitting boots that cramped her feet and chafed her chilblains. Friends of Dorothy’s mistress seemed to have a dazzling surplus of clothes discarded by their daughters, and while Mercy didn’t wear the prettiest dresses to work, even her plain, serviceable clothes looked quite smart and respectable.

‘You’re turning into a right toff,’ Elsie teased her.

‘Well, Rosalie’ll be able to have all this lot when she’s bigger,’ Mercy said.

Yes, life was much better. Elsie noticed Mercy’s new softness, a lack of the aggression that had always flared so easily in her before. She was gentle with Susan, tried to comfort her, though knowing there was no true comfort for this kind of loss.

One oppressively grey morning Mercy set off as usual with Johnny and Tom. It was threatening snow and the clouds had already squeezed out a few fat flakes which were drifting down through the biting air. They walked fast to keep warm, Johnny, slightly ahead, impatient as a spring, and Tom beside her, both with their caps pulled down hard and hands pushed into their jacket pockets. Mercy’s coat – another offering from Dorothy – was blue with a smooth velvet collar, and she wore a little, old-fashioned bonnet the colour of pigeons’ wings. She was beginning to feel small now beside the twins, Johnny especially, who was more than a head taller than her. They walked watching their feet. The pavement was icy.

‘’Ow’s Susan bearing up?’ Tom asked ‘She don’t say much.’

‘She misses ’er mom. Cries quite a bit for ’er – nights, you know, when there’s time to think about it. But like you say, she don’t keep on about it much. She’s that busy in the day she’s no time to dwell on it.’

‘It’s rotten when yer come to think of it though,’ Tom said, pale face wincing at the cold. ‘First ’er dad goes off and leaves ’er, then ’er mom. And that’s on top of ’er legs, like.’

Mercy didn’t say anything, just walked on, eyes stung by the cold air which seemed to blast up from the hub of the waking city as if from a freezing cauldron. Tom looked round at her with his dark eyes. If Mercy had been looking, she’d have seen the unguarded expression of affection in them.

‘I s’pose it weren’t any better for you neither,’ he said apologetically. They didn’t talk like this normally. As a rule it was pranks and gossip on the way to work, the lads sometimes sparring and cuffing each other.

Mercy sighed. ‘Never knew my mom and dad in the first place to lose ’em, did I?’

‘How d’you get to that home then?’ Johnny blurted out.

‘Dunno. They never told me. They found me somewhere – in the street. That’s my mom, the streets of Brum!’ She tried to make a joke of it. ‘Any’ow, that’s way back now, and your mom’s been so good to us . . .’

Tom peeled off to work at Stern’s in Bull Street, and once they’d got to Wrigley’s in Digbeth Johnny was off on his rounds with the delivery cycle, red-eyed from the cold and warm breath streaming white from his mouth.

Mercy served in the shop. She loved the clean white tiles, the smells of dough, jam, burnt currants and steamy warmth. It was cosy, and sometimes she hugged herself behind the counter relishing the place, its neat rows of tarts and buns in the glass-fronted cabinets, the aroma of crusty bread, speckled gold of cinnamon and nutmeg on custard tarts, rich dabs of chocolate, coconut snow . . .

‘I wouldn’t swap my job,’ she told Susan. ‘It’s clean and warm, and all the people coming in – it’s friendly like.’

Mr Wrigley was a small, anxious man with an almost completely bald head and a pert moustache on his top lip, who toiled, perspiring constantly, in the bakehouse behind the shop. His wife, red-cheeked and stolid, carried in fresh trays of bread or cakes, dressed in a white apron dusted with flour.

‘’Ere yer go, bab,’ she’d say to Mercy. ‘’Ere’s more for yer!’ as if it were Mercy’s personal task to eat every cake in the shop.

Mercy served the customers, wrapped warm loaves in layers of tissue paper, pushed sticky buns into bags and rang up the purchases on the huge steel till. She also worked to keep the place looking attractive and orderly, sweeping the black and white tiled floor and rearranging the bread and cakes to fill the gaps.

‘It’s nice for us to ’ave such a pretty lass serving,’ Mrs Wrigley told her. ‘’Specially one who’s as presentable as you. Good for business like, ain’t it?’

‘Well I’m happy in my work, Mrs Wrigley,’ Mercy laughed. ‘And if it’s good for business, all the better.’

At closing time she and Johnny often set off together again, laughing and joking. She always enjoyed Johnny’s cheek. Unlike Tom he seemed energized by his day’s work, ready for anything, his freckled face pink and weather-beaten. Tom though, usually looked pale and tired after a day at Stern’s. His nails were always black with tarnish and silver polish. Mr Stern, a kindly, prematurely aged man with tiny wire spectacles, a grey beard and a large wife, was teaching Tom the art of engraving and burnishing silver. Later he was to learn electroplating. The shop’s windows were crammed with candlesticks, cups, medals and jewellery, and it was very dark inside, lit only by a single gas mantle.