After Hours (2 page)

Ernie nodded and grinned. He enjoyed this nightly ritual; his stepmother yelling out last orders, only to be ignored, his pa, Duke Parsons, happily serving pints of best bitter, Annie grumbling behind his back.

‘Now, don't go on, Annie.' Duke leaned his elbows on the bar, gold watch-chain swinging forward from his broad chest. ‘It's a Saturday night, ain't it?'

‘And it'll be the same on Sunday, Monday and blooming Tuesday night!' Annie breathed hard on a glass and polished it to perfection. ‘According to you, Wilf Parsons, there's no such thing as licensing laws. Oh, no, it's all “Drink up, Jim, and have one on the house!” with you.' She reached on tiptoe to put the glass on its shelf above the bar.

‘We just gotta be thankful we can plod along,' Duke growled back. It was the same reply as always. ‘No one's flush with money down the court these days.'

‘Play me a different tune, Duke.' Annie shook her head and wiped on. They'd been married almost ten years now, and the patter was always the same.

‘Well, who am I to deny them a drink when they've cash in their pockets to buy one?'

Ernie nodded at this too, and plunged more glasses into the sudsy water. Year in, year out, the routine reassured him and bound
him safe in the arms of his large family. Gradually the terror of being accused of Daisy O'Hagan's murder had receded into the darkest recesses of his simple mind. He knew what he knew; he was innocent, he washed glasses, Duke and Annie would look after him.

‘How about a sing-song, our Amy?' Arthur Ogden, a permanent fixture at the bar, called out to his daughter.

Amy had rolled up at the Duke for the evening with some of her pals from the living-in quarters at Dickins and Jones, where she worked as a shop assistant. They'd signed themselves out, all five of them, writing down the Duke as their destination; East End girls glad of a good night out. They jumped at the chance to sing along to a tune on the old pianola.

‘Let's have that Scottish one, “I love a lassie”!' Ruby Thornton sprang to her feet and made a beeline for the stack of pianola rolls. ‘“A bonnie, bonnie lassie!”' she trilled above the hubbub of glasses, striking a bold figure with her dyed blonde hair cut daringly short.

Amy's mother, Dolly, got there first and ferreted around in the cardboard box containing the rolls of perforated paper. ‘It's here somewhere. I don't mind singing along to that one myself.'

‘More like “One of the ruins that Oliver Cromwell knocked about a bit”,' Arthur muttered to Bertie Hill. He didn't expect a reply. Hill was a miserable blighter, unpopular due to the fact that he'd recently bought up Eden House, the old tenement block at the bottom of the court where the O'Hagan family still lived. A new landlord was always treated with suspicion: he could start thinking about turning out tenants and razing the whole lot to the ground, like they did down Meredith Court last year. ‘Did you hear they found two baby skellingtons buried in one of them cellars?' Arthur said out of the blue. ‘Never put a name to them neither. Said they could have lain there mouldering for twenty years and nobody knew a thing!'

Charlie Ogden, standing at his father's side after an evening on duty at the Gem, gave the old man's drinking arm a nudge. ‘Lay off, Pa, for God's sake.' Life was gloomy enough. ‘He's had one over the eight,' he explained to the landlord.

Bertie Hill smiled his tight, humourless smile and drank up. He rapped his empty glass down on the bartop, picked up his trilby hat and prepared to go home. ‘Time for my beauty sleep.' He smirked. He'd taken a back room in his own tenement to tide him over. The story went that he'd been a copper, up on the other side of the water, who was thrown out of the force for being crooked; a rumour seized on by Dolly and some of the market women. ‘He looks like a copper,' they agreed. ‘And he smells like one. Carbolic soap, and the stuff they use to scrub the station up Union Street.'

Few people said goodnight to Hill's burly, sandy-haired figure as he made his way through the etched and bevelled glass doors of the Duke of Wellington public house.

They carried on with their sing-song, which was in full swing by the time Richie Palmer came along Duke Street arm-in-arm with Sadie. Bertie Hill tipped his hat to them both as he turned and disappeared down the court.

‘My poor feet!' Sadie hesitated fifty yards down the street and signed. They'd walked all the way from the Picturedrome and it was almost midnight. The strains of ‘Stop yer tickling, Jock!' and the shrieks of the women easily reached them as she stooped to examine the splashes on her pale cream stockings.

The walk home had been mostly silent, with Sadie still half-cross, half-guilty that she'd agreed to come out with Richie in the first place. She thought of faithful Walter stuck behind a telephone in the taxi office. At last, as they'd come down by the side of the giant Town Hail, she'd been driven to sarcasm. ‘My, ain't you the chatterbox!' She'd tugged at Richie's arm to signal that they should cross the road. It was cold, the damp had seeped through the thin leather soles of her shoes, and she was downright miserable.

At first he hadn't responded, only shoving his hands deeper into his pockets and trapping her arm against his side. ‘Well, if it's small-talk you want,' he said, hurrying her up the kerb, ducking down an alley towards Union Street.

‘Small-talk, any talk.' She frowned. ‘Anything would do. Like, why you asked me to walk out in the first place.'

He stopped suddenly. ‘Like, why you said yes,' he countered. He stood looking down at her, the mist settling in his straight, dark hair.

‘Because I wanted to see the picture,' she said awkwardly. When he spoke, she noticed that he slurred his words together slightly.

‘You could do that any time.' He looked down at the pavement as they turned from each other and began to walk on.

‘Then it was because you asked me, I expect.' She went a step or two ahead.

‘You could've said no, like you always did before.' He followed Sadie's slight, small figure, warmly wrapped in soft red cloth. The hat made a bell shape on her head.

‘And don't I wish I did say no!' She turned exasperated. ‘You ain't been very friendly to me, Richie, and I don't know why!'

‘What's friendly?' He came up close, took her by the elbow.

‘Talking. Telling me about yourself.'

He shrugged. ‘What's to tell?' The shadowy alley where they stood was full of scuttling, whispering sounds. Footsteps echoed along the main street. ‘Talk,' he said, shrugging again. ‘Hot air.'

Sadie found herself staring up into his face. His eyes gleamed, then he turned away, though he still held her arm in its tight grip. In profile, his forehead jutted over a long, straight nose. His top lip had a slight upward tilt, his jaw was set strong and firm. She raised one gloved fingertip to his lips.

He bent and kissed her. Her hat fell backwards from her head and the glossy halo of wavy hair came free. Her lips, soft and warm, opened slightly.

She felt the dampness of his hair, the hard smoothness of his collar. She was in his arms and she was kissing him.

Then he eased back and stooped to pick up her hat, brushing puddle-water from its velvety surface with his coatsleeve. ‘Don't put it back on,' he said as he handed it to her, ‘I like to see your hair.'

The compliment took her by surprise as much as her own sudden desire to kiss Richie Palmer on the lips. ‘That's more than Pa did when I first came home with it all chopped off.' She stuffed her
hat into her bag, trying to lighten the mood. ‘Pa's got old-fashioned ideas, especially about women's hairstyles. He said he'd divorce Annie if she ever came home with her hair looking like mine! And I don't know what else.'

Richie put his arm around her shoulder. He felt the light sweep of the offending haircut against his wrist. ‘I like it.' He almost smiled as they walked on up the alley. Their silence was easier, though a question still hovered as they saw Bertie Hill raise his hat to them and heard the raucous music drift towards them from the pub.

‘And will you go with me again?' Richie stopped and drew her into the shelter of Henshaws' doorway, out of the cold rain that had begun to fall.

Sadie shook her head. ‘I don't know, Richie. Maybe I ought not?' She looked away, catching her own reflection in the eating-house window.

‘Why?' the low, slow voice insisted.

‘What will Walter think? Or Rob, for that matter. You could lose your job over something like this.'

His mouth twitched down into a grimace. ‘It ain't my job you're fretting over.'

She frowned and tried to sidestep him back on to the street. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. But I am bothered by us walking out together again, Richie, and that's a fact. I wish you wouldn't ask me right now.'

He leaned against the door, rattling it with his shoulder, letting her step by. ‘Well, then, I expect you'll let me know when I can ask again. Send me a telegram. Call me on the telephone.'

‘Don't be like that.'

‘Then don't you.'

They walked the last few yards down Duke Street in another kind of silence. At the brightly lit double door she paused to look up at him, but Richie turned and walked across the street without looking back. She didn't even know where he lived; not one thing about him. Yet she'd kissed him on the lips. She darted inside the pub, a hot flush of guilt on her cheeks.

‘This allotment will set me up good and proper,' Arthur Ogden declared as Sadie came in. Annie stood behind the bar patiently paying attention. ‘You just see if it don't!'

‘Good for you, Arthur.' Annie went on wiping glasses.

She waved at Sadie. ‘Hello there. Bleeding long pictures they show up at that Picturedome place!'

‘Pictured
r
ome.' Sadie rolled the second ‘r'.

‘And come again tomorrow. We was worried about you, girl.'

‘Well, there's no need.' She drifted into the emptying room, perched on a stool and placed her bag and gloves on the bar. ‘Here I am, safe and sound.'

Arthur, listening in, returned Charlie's earlier nudge with a vengeance. ‘Look lively, son, and buy the girl a drink. Can't you see she looks done in?'

Charlie dug into his pocket and ordered Sadie a glass of port wine.

Duke obliged. ‘You never walked back, did you?' he asked his youngest girl as he pushed the glass along towards her. ‘Who was you with? Them typewriter pals from work?'

‘That's right.' Sadie nodded. She sipped her drink to avoid meeting Duke's eye.

‘And what's the matter, couldn't you get Walter to send out a taxicab to pick you all up?' Charlie interrupted. ‘That's a bit tight of him, ain't it?'

Sadie gave her old boyfriend a scornful look and turned to Arthur. ‘What was that you was saying about an allotment?' she prompted.

Charlie's brows went up as he pulled at his own pint glass. ‘Them typewriters ain't wearing trousers and trilby hats by any chance?' he muttered.

Again Sadie ignored him. ‘Go on, Arthur, tell us about your cabbage patch.'

‘Hallotment,' Arthur announced, very grand. ‘Down the side of the railway embankment on Meredith Court.' The words rolled inside his mouth and slipped over his tongue. He drew descriptive pictures in the air with his free hand, while the other stayed clamped around his empty glass. ‘It's going to make me a man of substance, I can tell you. That little patch of land is going to bring pride
h
and prosperity to the Hogden family!'

‘Pride and what?' Amy breezed up to say goodnight. ‘Leave off, Pa, and say goodnight. Time I was off.'

‘Shame!' Dolly squeezed Amy's arm as her daughter made a sour face. Though Amy fretted about having to live in at the Regent Street shop, Dolly knew she liked her life in the West End better than the office life Dolly had once planned for her. She didn't waste much sympathy on Amy's grumbles as she watched her, Ruby and the rest out of the door. Then she turned back to Sadie. ‘Arthur ain't boring you with tales of his giant Brussel sprouts, I hope?'

Sadie laughed, feeling her balance return, her heartbeat slow back to normal after the confusing episode with Richie Palmer.

Little Arthur bridled and drew himself up. ‘No I ain't! You just wait, Dolly Ogden, till them rows of carrots come up perfect, and all them beautiful onions and cabbages. When I've sold them on the market at a tidy profit, you'll be laughing on the other side of your face!'

Dolly's smile was as good-humoured as ever. ‘You ain't never held the right end of a spade in your life, old man. And you don't know a dandelion from a dockleaf. No, it's another of them flash-in-the-pans, if you ask me.' She eased her husband's grip from the empty glass and stood him upright, then pointed him in the direction of the door. ‘And we all know who'll be down there digging and weeding, don't we?' she said to Sadie with a wink. ‘And that man's name ain't Arthur Ogden.'

‘Nor Charlie neither,' her son warned. ‘You won't catch me dirtying my hands for a few frostbitten turnips.' He drank to the dregs, then put down his glass.

‘I never thought it was,' Dolly called cheerfully. She shepherded Arthur through the front hallway on to the dismal street.

There was the round of goodnights, scraping chairs, swinging doors before the bar eventually emptied, leaving Duke to lock up behind his regulars. Annie laid clean towels over the row of shiny new pump handles, then she dimmed the gaslights. It was already the early hours of Sunday morning.

‘Bye bye, Sadie,' Charlie said. He stayed to the very last, still curious about her flushed face and evasive manner when she first came in. He looked a slight, sensitive type in his Prince of Wales tweed jacket, with his light brown hair brushed across his forehead from a side parting. His face was still fresh, smooth, even slightly womanish. He regarded his long-lost sweetheart from under furrowed brows. ‘I hope you ain't doing nothing I wouldn't do?'