After Hours (28 page)

Dolly regarded him with open pity. ‘Ain't you put two and two together yet, Alf?'

‘And made five, like you, Dolly?' came the quick reply. ‘And rob you of the thrill of telling me?' He was a quick-talking, edgy man with a snappy temperament.

‘I've a good mind not to let you in on it,' Dolly huffed. ‘See how
you
like losing your licence.'

‘Come off it, Dolly.' Liz didn't want to run the risk of sacrificing another Duke Street watering-hole. She beckoned Alf across. ‘It's obvious, ain't it? Since they opened the old Duke under a new name with Bertie Hill in charge, the whole street's been buzzing with it. Don't you see, it was Hill what dropped Duke in it!'

Alf wasn't slow to see the logic. ‘But you can't be sure,' he objected.

Once more, Dolly swept aside doubt. ‘'Course we're bleeding sure. Think about it, we been pottering along at the Duke nice and quiet, year in, year out, with no one to bother us. Duke opens and closes the doors when it suits his customers. We take no notice of all that after hours lark. Then along comes that snake, Hill. He buys up the old tenement and shoves up the rents, a real old Scrooge. He comes drinking at the Duke, but he ain't welcome. It's never his shout, and he never sticks his hand in his pocket to pay his round. He trots home to bed at half-ten like a good little boy.'

Alf nodded at each emphatic point.

Dolly sailed on. ‘And when we come to mention it, we seen him skulking round the place with strangers. They was narks, plain as the nose on your face. He gets Duke in a whole heap of bother with the coppers, then he goes straight down the brewery and sticks his name at the top of the list to be the next landlord, before anyone else gets a look in. The brewery keeps the lid on it; Hill's promised them lots of fancy changes and more money in their tills. He had it all worked out, see.' Dolly had been the very first to spot the conspiracy, forgetting all charges against Wiggin, the moment Arthur had darted on to the street shouting Bertie Hill's name.

‘I ain't never taken to him.' Joe O'Hagan, wise after the event, had found his own cramped corner at the overcrowded bar. He rebuffed an approach from a Salvation Army collector, a girl of about eighteen with a mass of wavy, light brown hair tucked under her blue bonnet.

‘Just tell your Tommy to give him the cold shoulder, then,' Dolly reminded Joe. ‘We don't want no one round here breaking the
boycott. We're gonna starve him out, see. If no one buys nothing from the bleeding traitor and the pub stands empty, week in, week out, the brewery will soon get sick of that, and Bertrand Gladstone Hill will be out on his arse!' She grinned in anticipation, ordered Arthur to buy her another drink, and then she settled down at Liz's table for a game of cribbage.

Among the rampant changes and the campaign to freeze Hill out of his new tenancy, George Mann found himself at a loss. He was no more pleased than the next man at discovering the identity of the new landlord, but he decided to hang on as cellarman for a few days, until he'd had a chance to talk things through with Hettie. He went about the business of rolling the empty barrels up the ramp and through the bar, out front on to the pavement, ready for collection. When the drays rolled up to deliver the new ones, he shouldered them from the cart and rolled them on the return journey down into the cellar. There he set them up on the long gantry, tapped the vent holes to allow the keg to breathe and inserted a new tap in one end. No need to worry about giving them a chance to settle before use, however; the barrels stayed full, just as the bar above stayed almost empty of customers.

George quickly learned how to handle his new boss's unsmiling demeanour and lack of experience in the job. He ignored them both, relieved of the necessity of maintaining a false cheerfulness by the former, and simply covering up the latter with his own expertise. George could have run the pub single-handed, with trade the way it now was.

It had one advantage: Bertie Hill's intention of keeping a clean nose with the brewery meant that he stuck to the letter of the licensing laws, so George got off early on the first Saturday night after an evening of desultory passing trade, despite the elegance of the new surroundings.

‘Word will soon get round,' Hill assured his trickle of customers, including Jack Cooper. ‘Then things will really take off.'

Cooper nodded and knocked back his whisky. He didn't care where he drank, so long as people minded their own business and
left him to his. His skin was mottled by years of over-indulgence, and sagged badly around the chin and eyes, which had all but disappeared behind folds of flesh. His appearance was going downhill fast: the good suits to the pawnshop to support his growing drinking habit, the bowler-hat fingermarked and scuffed. These days he neglected to shave and wash. Grime had collected beneath his fingernails, and his shoe leather was grey and cracked. He didn't even care that Edith left him daily to his own devices, setting off at dawn on the bus to Ealing, getting into her stride as the new assistant at Hettie and Jess's dress shop. She took care not to mention it to him, lest his temper flare, when he would snarl abuse about her descent to shop-girl status at the grand old age of fifty-five.

That Saturday, George left the pub at half-ten on the dot. He took his cap from the hook in the hall and collected his old sit-up-and-beg bicycle from the alleyway at the back. Then he shot off in the direction of Bear Lane, to meet Hettie out of the Mission. On his way, he met Rob Parsons, the two men stopped to chat, and George promised Rob that he would see his sister safely home to Ealing.

‘Blimey, you ain't gone and got yourself an old jalopy, have you, George?' Rob knew it was too late for the trams and buses.

George grinned. ‘No such luck. But a pal of mine's just got hold of an old Matchless motor-bike and side-car. I was planning to ride over and borrow it, then take Hettie home in that.'

‘Ett in a side-car, eh?' Rob gave a low whistle. ‘Best of luck, mate.' He flicked his cigarette butt into the gutter. ‘How's things?' he asked obliquely.

‘You mean at the Duke?' George stuck by the old name. ‘Slack, Rob. Ain't nothing doing.'

Rob grunted with satisfaction.

‘I been thinking of handing in my notice,' George went on. ‘I don't sleep easy in my bed no more.'

Rob shook his head. ‘Think twice before you jump ship,' he advised. ‘No one holds it against you for hanging on to the job.'

George nodded. ‘Thanks, Rob. I'd best be off.' He set off again, pedalling hard uphill towards Commercial Street, where his friend,
Herbert Burrows, lived. After a rapid bargaining session over the loan of the motor-bike, a gleaming black and silver roadster with a four-cylinder engine, George took the machine out of the back yard on to the road. He kicked the pedal starter and roared the motor into action with a twist of the handlebar throttle. He set off and within minutes was approaching Bear Lane in a cloud of blue smoke and petrol fumes.

Taken aback, Hettie caught sight of him as she came out of the Mission. She accepted the lift and stepped gingerly into the three-wheeled, sporty little side-car. ‘Good job I tied my bonnet on,' she joked nervously. It was her first time in such a contraption, which seemed dangerously fast, unstable and close to the ground. She found going round bends too terrifying for words, and the roar of the exhaust as George came down the gears to stop at junctions jarred her nerves.

At last, Ealing Common hove into view, edged by gas-lamps, covered by a fine autumn mist. George slowed to a halt outside Jess's house, jumped off the saddle and ran gallantly to open Hettie's low door. She felt her knees wobble and her hand shake as she stepped out.

‘You wasn't scared, was you?' George grinned.

‘Not a bit. Just chilly,' she said airily. Then she laughed. ‘Scared to death, if you must know.' She invited him in for cocoa, glad to have him there to help break the atmosphere that was bound to develop between Jess and Maurice when he got home from the cinema.

When Maurice did walk in, George was already sitting with his large hand wrapped around a blue and white striped mug. He was there when Maurice told Jess that he'd carried out his threat to sack Charlie Ogden for not pulling his weight. Jess could only sit there in silent, helpless anger. Then George changed the subject by dropping his own bombshell. ‘I decided, I'm gonna finish at the Duke tomorrow,' he announced. ‘I ain't happy under Bertie Hill. I'm gonna look around for a new place.'

When they got over their surprise, Hettie, Jess and Maurice nodded, understood, showed their appreciation. At just gone
midnight, Hettie showed him to the door, waiting for him to fix his cap on his head, back to front, to keep the peak out of the wind. Then she kissed him gently and gratefully.

‘I did the right thing, then?' he asked. ‘I don't want no one thinking bad of me.'

‘No one could,' she whispered, ‘Least of all me, George. I think you're a lovely man, and I'm a lucky woman, that's what I think.'

Their embrace, close and warm, sealed his decision. Next day, his day off, he went specially to the Duke and told Hill he could stick his bleeding job on someone else, if he could find anyone in Duke Street low enough to take it on.

In the middle of October, Sadie went back to the doctor to have her pregnancy confirmed. The baby was due in May.

After her row with Richie over going behind his back to see if she could get his old job back, she hadn't dared follow up the possibility, and Richie was still without work. True to his word, Walter had in fact telephoned to say that Rob was fixed as ever against the idea of reinstating Richie. Rob was in a spot of bother himself, and Walter advised her to leave the problem alone for the time being. He was sorry, but try as he might, he hadn't been able to help.

As her troubles mounted, instead of going under as might have been suspected, Sadie's backbone seemed to stiffen. As soon as the baby became definite, the tears and pleas vanished and she became determined to manage. She put it down to an experience she had on coming out of the doctor's surgery with the news that she was indeed pregnant.

She thanked the doctor, a bookish-looking young woman with horn-rimmed glasses, who'd chosen to come and work in London's East End after a medical training in Edinburgh. She was observant enough to notice that Sadie's left hand lacked a wedding ring. ‘And you think you'll be able to manage?' Dr McLeod asked, remarking Sadie's slight figure and pale young race.

Sadie nodded. ‘Yes, thanks. We'll be fine.'

‘We?'

‘Me and Richie, the baby's pa.'

Reassured, the doctor smiled. ‘And you have family to help?'

‘Ain't no need. We'll manage.' Sadie's head went up as she walked from the surgery and headed, only partly consciously, by bus along the leafstrewn and windswept roads to Green Park, where she alighted and gave herself one precious half-hour to absorb the news.

It was five o'clock, the sky already lead-grey and fast losing its light. The leaves of the sycamore trees hung from their branches like so many limp yellow flags. Brown ones, already fallen, crunched underfoot. A cold breeze made her pull her red coat around her, shoulders hunched, cutting across the grass to avoid the paths where tramps slept upright on the benches and stray dogs searched for scraps. No lamps were lit, and it was easy for Sadie to feel herself swallowed by the dusk, to sense a calm beginning to envelop her, here under the trees, among the green and gold and autumnal browns. She stopped to look up through the branches of a great horse-chestnut tree, watching leaves loosen and spiral to the ground. ‘Well,' she thought, as dearly, as certainly as she'd ever thought anything, ‘I'm gonna have this baby.' Immediately she talked to the child in her womb as if it had life of its own and was capable of hearing. ‘Don't you worry, everything's fine now. I'm gonna take care of you and see to you, and you ain't never gonna be left on your own.'

She strode on across the grass. ‘We'll have each other, and Richie will grow to love you as much as me. There'll be the three of us, and we don't need no one else. There's gonna be just me and you and Richie. Life's a wonderful thing, I promise. The world's a beautiful place. Look at the trees, them leaves, that sky.'

She walked herself into a trance, only breaking out of it when she reached some far railings; and the sound of trams, buses and other traffic broke into her daydream. Then she caught sight of the clock in the square tower of a church opposite, saw that Richie would be expecting her. She turned to go home to Mile End, and to talk over realities; the fact that she would lose her job as soon
as her condition began to show, that they must meanwhile scrape and save every penny, that he must find work at all costs.

For days after Maurice announced that he'd gone ahead and sacked Charlie Ogden, Jess could hardly bring herself to speak to him. His apparent heartlessness frightened her; how could he throw on to the scrapheap someone who'd trusted and relied on him for so long? Charlie had even cut short his school career to go into the cinema business, dreaming the boys' dream of bright lights and success, albeit from the wrong side of the flickering screen. True, his enthusiasm had waned along with those early dreams, but he was reliable, he knew all there was to know about front-of-house, and besides, the Ogdens were close neighbours of the Parsonses, and Jess felt personally responsible for letting them down.

What would Charlie do now? His slight stature and sensitive air made him ill-equipped to vie for work on the docks, or even on the markets, and Jess couldn't see him chained to a factory bench for the rest of his days. These thoughts churned in her head, like a whirring engine that drove her further out of sympathy with her husband's action. Maurice himself, his mouth set firm, his eyes avoiding hers, refused to discuss it.