Across the Mersey (18 page)

‘Oh, and we’re going to my parents for our Christmas dinner,’ she told Alan.

‘I told you last week that we were going to mine.’

‘Did you? I must have forgotten,’ Bella told him insincerely.

‘Bitch.’ Alan swore at her as he made another grab for her, lunging towards her and then staggering into the table when Bella sidestepped him neatly.

He was always aggressive and inclined to violence when he’d been drinking. She made to step past him, but he moved faster than she had anticipated, trapping her with the weight of his body, just like he did in bed, but now against the door.

She gave him a withering look and then gasped in shocked pain when he thumped her in the stomach. The pain sent her sick and too dizzy to move, fury filling her that he should dare to treat her like this. But then he hit her again and again and her fury became fear and that fear became a pain that overwhelmed and enveloped her to become a red haze of agony splintered by his continuing blows, until mercifully oblivion overtook her.

Bella came round to the savage thrust of Alan’s body within her own. Slowly and painfully she opened her eyes. She knew she was still in the kitchen, because from where she was lying she could see the blurry outline of the legs of the kitchen table. She shifted her gaze to Alan, too weak to do anything other than focus helplessly on the blind fixed expression of hatred and triumph contorting his face, as he thrust violently into her, the friction
of his movements within her unwelcoming body a fresh source of pain.

His lips were curled back against his teeth, his eyes narrowed and glittering.

‘Bitch! Bitch!’ He all but screamed the word at her when he saw that her eyes were open, his breath coming in short excited bursts until finally his frenzy overwhelmed him and it was over. The movement of his body blotted out the light as he leaned over her, his fingers fastening in her hair and then tightening, bringing fresh pain as he lifted her head and then banged it down hard on the linoleum, allowing her to escape back into nothingness.

‘You’ve passed! Oh, Grace love, I’m that proud of you.’ Jean dabbed at her eyes with the corner of her apron. Grace had arrived just as Jean was finishing peeling the potatoes for dinner, and now her mother added, ‘I knew it must be good news the minute I set eyes on you, you looked that happy.’

‘I still can’t believe it.’ Grace shook her head.

Her mother was every bit as thrilled and pleased as Grace had known she would be, and it was lovely to be home. It was only now that she was here that she recognised just how much she had missed her family

‘Your dad’s gone down to the allotment and the twins with him. Him and a few of the others have decided to try keeping a couple of pigs. They’ll be back soon. He’ll be ever so pleased that you’ve passed, love.’

‘I don’t know how I ever got to pass. I keep thinking it’s a mistake. I’m having to pinch meself to make sure it’s real,’ Grace laughed. ‘I’m that
happy that the Hospital is letting us all go home for Christmas, Mum. I was really upset thinking I wouldn’t be able to be here. Do you think that Luke might get home?’

‘I don’t know, love.’ Jean looked sad, her face crumpling slightly.

‘I do so wish that Luke and Dad would make up,’ Grace said. ‘I had a letter from Luke on Wednesday. I think he must be in France, although of course he can’t say.’

Jean tried to smile. Luke wrote regularly to them as well, but whilst she read his letters over and over again, Sam refused even to look at them.

‘Seeing as you’re back you can come down to St John’s market with me this afternoon. I want to go and order a goose for Christmas Day. With your dad getting extra pay for doing his bit, I’ve managed to put a decent bit away for some Christmas treats. Might as well buy them now ’cos your dad reckons we’ll have rationing before long. We can look round and perhaps order a nice tongue as well …’

‘I’m sorry, Mum, but I can’t go with you.’

‘You can’t? Why not?’

Grace looked self-conscious. ‘I’ve promised to go to a matinée this afternoon.’

‘With those girls you’ve made friends with?’ Jean guessed.

Grace went pink. ‘No, not them. It’s a lad I’ve met. A decent sort, he is,’ she told her mother hurriedly, seeing that she was beginning to look concerned. ‘I told you about him. He’s the one
who gave me a lift back to the hospital after the wedding and that accident.’

Grace could see that her mother wasn’t looking convinced.

‘He lives in Wavertree,’ she told her, ‘with his mum and dad up on Oakhill Road. His dad’s got a greengrocer’s shop.’

Jean pursed her lips. ‘Oakhill Road? It’s all semidetached’s up there. Me and your dad looked at one. Nice big garden, it had, but only the three bedrooms, them not having any attic like we’ve got here.’

‘We’re closer to the shops as well,’ Grace pointed out. ‘Teddy says his mum is always complaining about how far she’s got to walk.’

‘Well …’ Grace could see that her mother wasn’t looking quite so concerned now that she had told her a bit about Teddy, but she still warned her with maternal concern, ‘Just you be careful, Grace. There’s a war on, after all, and some of these lads—’

‘Teddy isn’t like that,’ Grace assured her. ‘Bin just as he ought to be with me all along, he has. Anyway, it’s only a matinée.’

‘Well, I’m not sure what your dad will have to say.’

‘I’m nineteen, Mum, and a nurse – well, I will be,’ she amended before changing the subject. ‘I’ve brought the twins some chocolate. I thought I’d get them one of those records they’re so fond of for Christmas.’

‘Your dad won’t thank you for that. He threatens
to get rid of that gramophone at least once a week. Mad about their music, they are. I caught the pair of them doing this daft dancing the other day. Jitterbugging, they called it.’ Jean shook her head. ‘They’ve learned it from that Eileen Jarvis in their class at school, whose sister teaches dancing. In my day we knew how to dance properly, a nice waltz or a foxtrot, not this silly stuff.’

Grace hid a small smile. The other girls had been saying only the other day that they ought to be thinking of getting tickets for some dances over Christmas, and especially for New Year’s Eve, and they had mentioned the new jitterbug craze, which was so popular in America.

Her head hurt so much she could hardly lift it off the pillow, and when Bella tried to move the pain in her stomach and her ribs took her breath.

The chair was still where she had put it last night under the door handle to keep Alan out of the bedroom, though. She could see it in the dim light coming in through the blackout blinds her mother had made for her, and which were press-studded to the window frame. She looked at the alarm clock. Eleven o’clock! She had vague memories of dragging herself upstairs and then being violently sick in the bathroom before shutting herself in the bedroom and propping the chair under the handle so that Alan wouldn’t be able to get in.

Alan. He’d be at work now. He was always
moaning about the fact that his father insisted he work on Saturday mornings. She got out of bed cautiously, tensing in anticipation against the pain that movement would bring.

Bruises were already forming on her stomach and her ribs, her flesh too sore to bear the pressure of her own explorative touch. Bitterness calcified the angry contempt she already felt for Alan, overlaying last night’s fear. He needn’t think she was going to let him get away with what he had done, because she wasn’t. She lifted her hand to the back of her head. She could feel a lump where he had banged her head on the floor, and her hair was sticky. She removed her had and looked in horror at the dried blood on her fingers.

Tears burned her eyes as she moved too quickly and pain savaged her back into immobility. Just let him wait until she told her parents what he had done. Mummy would have her back home with them before Alan could say a word.

Bella frowned, ignoring the thudding pain that struck right through her head. Was that what she wanted? Being a married woman was far better than being an unmarried daughter living at home. A married woman was to be envied by those girls not lucky enough to be looking forward to their own marriage. She could just imagine how some of those cats at the Tennis Club would gossip about her behind her back if it got out that she had let Alan treat her so badly that she had had to go running home to her mother.

No, she had a better idea. Another way of punishing him. A better way; a way that would scare him, and give her the upper hand, she decided triumphantly.

‘Oh, it’s you, Bella.’

Alan’s mother certainly didn’t look very pleased to see her, Bella acknowledged, but that didn’t bother her. Mrs Parker wore her greying hair scraped back into a tight bun. She was a tall woman, taller than her husband and very well built, with an uncompromising no-nonsense manner.

‘I hope you don’t mind, Mother-in-law, but I feel ever so poorly, I really do.’

Bella might be having to fake her exaggerated politeness but she didn’t have to fake the pain that had her lifting her hand to her head, or the dark shadows bruising the skin beneath her eyes. ‘I would have gone home to Mummy, but, well, I wasn’t sure I could …’ She closed her eyes and leaned heavily against the open front door.

‘You’d better come in,’ Alan’s mother told her, curtly taking hold of her arm, and urging her, ‘Hurry up. I don’t want the neighbours talking.’

Once she had closed the front door behind Bella, she released her, eyeing her with hostility.

‘Now what exactly is it that’s wrong with you?’

White-faced, her voice faltering, Bella told her truthfully, ‘I’ve been ever so sick … and … and fainting. I wouldn’t have come round bothering you but I just didn’t know what to do. Alan will be back for his lunch any minute, but I’ve left him
a note saying that I’m here. I thought that perhaps the fresh air …’

Bella could see that Alan’s mother had looked more displeased and grim with every word she had uttered. Well, it would serve her right to be led up the garden path a little bit after the mean way she’d been with her, and think that she was pregnant, especially with her going on about goody-goody Trixie all the time, even if the truth was that Bella wanted herself to be pregnant with Alan’s baby even less than she knew her mother-in-law did.

‘Well, I still don’t know what you’ve come round here for. It seems to me that it’s a doctor you want to be seeing, not me,’ she told Bella forthrightly.

‘A doctor! Oh, no. I mean …’ Bella allowed her eyes to fill with tears and her bottom lip to tremble. ‘I know it was only an accident – Alan wasn’t even there – but … well, it sounds so silly saying that I knocked myself out walking into a door, and then went and cut my head as well.’

Alan’s mother’s face was a picture as she struggled between immediate relief and the sudden horrified dawning that what she might be facing could be a lot worse than an unwanted grandchild.

‘You’ve had an accident?’ she demanded.

‘Could I have a cup of tea?’ Bella begged her. ‘And p’haps sit down? Only I feel ever so weak.’

‘You’d better come into the kitchen.’

Delighted that her plan was going so well, Bella followed her mother-in-law down the cold drab
hallway. The Parkers’ house was nowhere as nicely done out as her parents’. The skirtings and doors were painted dull dark brown, lincrusta wallpaper painted dark green stretched up from the skirting to dado rail height above, while the rest of the wall was papered in maroon and green striped wallpaper. The whole effect was overpowering and gloomy.

The kitchen was no better, its walls painted in shiny green paint, the oilcloth on the floor the same dark brown as the skirtings.

The smell of cooking tripe filled the kitchen. Bella’s stomach heaved. She hated tripe and her own mother knew better than to cook it ever.

‘So what exactly happened then?’

Bella sank down into the chair she was offered and tried to blot out the smell of the cooking tripe.

‘It was just after Alan had come in from …’ Bella bit down on her bottom lip and let her voice falter. She was enjoying this. ‘Please don’t say anything to Mr Parker, will you, only poor Alan is working so hard and if he does stop off on the way home for a bit of a drink, well, he doesn’t mean any harm. Afterwards, he feels really bad about the way it makes him. He always says so.’

Alan’s mother looked as though she was about to explode. Her face had gone a deep beetroot red and her eyes were bulging in their sockets. She didn’t dress anything like as nicely as her own mother, Bella thought critically, and she certainly hoped she never got so stout.

‘Alan was there with you then, was he?’

Bella opened her mouth and then closed it again, the picture of uncertainty and guilt, the picture of a young wife desperate to protect her husband.

‘I …’

She was saved from having to reply by the sound of someone hammering on the back door, and she wasn’t at all surprised when Alan’s mother opened it to admit Alan himself, looking very different from the dapper full-of-himself young man who had first caught Bella’s eye. Unshaven, his suit creased and his shirt cuffs grubby, he looked wildly from Bella to his mother.

‘What’s she been telling you?’ he demanded.

‘I was just explaining to your mother about my accident, Alan, and how I walked into the door, and then fell over and banged my head.’ Bella gave him a reproachful limpid-eyed look, and had the pleasure of seeing the confusion darken his eyes.

‘Your mother was saying that I ought to see a doctor.’

‘No.’

Mother and son both spoke at once.

‘No, you did right to come round here, dear,’ Mrs Parker assured Bella, baring her teeth in what Bella assumed must be an attempt at a compassionate smile. ‘A bit of arnica on your bruises and you’ll be as good as new in a few days. And no going worrying your own parents, mind. I know how busy your mother is with all her charity work, and we wouldn’t want her to get herself into an
upset state, would we, not now that she’s my deputy?’

‘Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to worry Mummy,’ Bella agreed.

She turned to Alan. ‘I’m really sorry that I made you cross because I got all muddled up and told Mummy that we could go to her on Christmas Day, darling. Please say you’ll forgive me.’

‘Well, of course he does,’ Mrs Parker told her firmly. ‘Everyone has these silly little fall-outs when they first get married. And I dare say it was you being so upset about Alan being a little bit cross with you that caused you to be forgetful and have your accident in the first place, wasn’t it, Bella?’

Bella got up and went to Alan’s side, reaching for his hand and smiling up at him.

‘Yes … that’s exactly what happened,’ she agreed.

Alan was looking at her as though he couldn’t believe his luck, tears of gratitude sheening his eyes.

‘Perhaps you could say something to Mr Parker about how hard Alan’s having to work, Mother-in-law. He’s coming home at all hours.’

Alan stiffened.

‘I’m sure Alan won’t want me to worry his father when he’s got so much on his plate with all this extra war work that the council is needing to get done.’

The familiar frostiness was back in her mother-in-law’s voice, but Bella didn’t care. She had made
her point and satisfied herself that neither Alan nor his mother wanted Alan’s behaviour to get back to his father’s, or her parents’, ears.

When Teddy had asked Grace what film she would like to see she had told him
Wuthering Heights
with Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. She had seen it once already with her mother, but she knew she would enjoy seeing it again, because it was so deliciously spine-tingling and sad. A real girl’s film, Luke had scoffed, which it was. Not that she was testing Teddy or anything by choosing it, of course. No, not for one minute. But she had been pleased by the way he had smiled at her and immediately agreed that he’d like to see it as well, even though she was pretty sure he had only said so to please her. And then soft-heartedly she had told him that really she’d just as soon see
Jamaica
Inn
, and his eyes had lit up like a kiddie’s at the thought of pirates and fighting, his relief making her laugh.