Daughters of Liverpool (4 page)

Emily could still feel her face burning hot with angry humiliation, despite the cold air that hit her when she stepped out of the stage door of the Royal Court Theatre, where her husband, Con, was a producer, and into the narrow street that ran behind the building. It was her own fault, of course. She should have known better than to be taken in by Con’s lies and come down here with the sandwiches she’d made up for him, thinking that it would save him having to go out and buy himself something since he had said he was so busy with pantomime rehearsals that he wouldn’t be able to get home for his tea. Too busy to get home for his tea, but not too busy to take the afternoon off, apparently, and not, from the look she had seen on his assistant’s face, on his own.

Where was he now? Shacked up in some cheap hotel room with an even cheaper little slut, if she knew her husband.

She wasn’t going to cry. Big plain women like her didn’t cry; it made them look even uglier than they already were. Besides, she was all cried out
over her husband and her marriage. How could she not be when she knew what Con was and what a fool she had been to marry him?

Properly taken in by him at first, she’d been, and no mistake, a big gawky plain motherless girl, whose father had made himself a nice bit of money as a theatrical agent and who had died unexpectedly of a heart attack, leaving it all to her, his only child.

Con had come round to offer his condolences. She could remember now how her heart had thrilled when she had opened the door of the tall double-fronted Victorian terraced house at the top end of Wavertree Village where she had lived all her life, and seen him standing on the step.

She had never seen such a good-looking man and she had certainly never had one calling on her.

Six months later they were married. Con had insisted that it wasn’t disrespectful and that it was what her father would have wanted.

She had been so besotted with him by then that she would have agreed to anything, given him anything, she acknowledged. And of course she had already done both. Better for them to marry quickly just in case anything should happen, he had told her after the night he had got her so inebriated on sherry that she hadn’t even realised they were upstairs and in her bedroom with him undressing her until it was too late.

She had been grateful to him then, too stupid to realise what it was he was really after and why he was doing what he was doing to her.

Of course, that had all stopped once they were
married and he had what he wanted, which had been access to her father’s money. Her father had more sense than her, though, and he had put most of it safely away in investments, bonds and things, and a bit of a trust fund that couldn’t be touched. And that brought her in a good income even now. Good enough to keep Con still married to her, that was for sure. Married to her but bedding other women – younger, prettier women. And they, for all their pretty faces and slender bodies, were no better at seeing through him than she had been herself. Actresses, chorus girls, singers, those were the kind that appealed to Con. Just as she had done, they took one look at that handsome face of his, those laughing eyes, that slow curling smile, that thick dark hair and those broad shoulders, and they were smitten.

Con knew all the ways there were to make a woman fall in love with him and then break her heart. He had certainly broken hers more than once in the early days, with his protestations that it was her he loved, and his pleas for forgiveness.

But not even Con’s unfaithfulness had broken her heart quite as painfully and irreparably as the discovery that she could not have children.

Emily loved children. She had ached for babies of her own, dreamed of them, longed for them and cried the most bitter of tears for her inability to conceive.

Now, a sound in the alleyway caught her attention. It often seemed to Emily that the stage door to the theatre was symbolic of theatrical life itself. The face it showed to the world on the main street
was the face it wanted to be known by. Out in the front of house, where people queued to pay and watch the show, everything was shiny and smart, but go backstage, use the entrance those who worked within the theatre used, and it was a different story: peeling paint, a narrow alleyway blocked by bins, guarded by marauding cats and sometimes, poor buggers, the odd tramp poking around hoping to find something to eat. Something like Con’s unwanted sandwiches, for instance.

Emily could see a small shadow lurking by the bins. A
small
shadow? She frowned. Ah, yes, she could see him now, a dirty, poor-looking boy, his bare legs blue with cold, and his face pinched. He had seen her too. He looked terrified, so he wasn’t some young thief, then, hoping to grab her handbag. He was turning away from her. He looked hunted, desperate, and as thin as a stick. Emily’s heart melted.

‘Here, boy, you look hungry. You can have these,’ she told him, holding out Con’s greaseproof-paper-wrapped sandwiches to him.

He licked his lips, darting nervous looks towards her, and then down the alleyway, stretching out his hand and then withdrawing it, the look in his eyes one of mingled hunger and fear. Emily sensed that if she moved any closer to him he would turn and run.

‘Look, I’m going to put the sandwiches down here. Tinned salmon, they are, and best quality too,’ she told him inconsequently. ‘Brought them for my husband, I did, but he’s gone out. I’m going to put them down here and then I’m going to walk
away. If you’ve any sense, you won’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’

She put the sandwiches down and started to move away but then something stopped her and she turned back to him.

‘There’ll be some more this time tomorrow and some hot soup, if you want it, but don’t you go telling anyone else because I’m not feeding every young beggar in Liverpool, that I’m not.’

As she walked away from him Emily was dying to turn round but she made herself wait until she had reached the end of the alleyway. When she did turn, she wasn’t surprised to see that both the boy and the sandwiches had gone.

Poor little kid. More than half starved, he’d looked. Probably lost his home and p’haps his family as well – there’d been plenty of folk who had, thanks to Hitler’s bombs, according to the papers.

She made her way home – no point in bothering looking round the shops, seeing as they had nothing much to sell, thanks to the war. Not that she’d got anyone to go buying Christmas presents for, except her ungrateful and unfaithful husband. Spoiled him rotten, she had in those early years, and nothing but the best either – hand-made suits, a lovely camel coat with a smart fur collar, just like the big theatre owners on Broadway wore. She’d seen photographs. All Con had ever given her had been boxes of chocolates, and not fancy ones either. That poor little kid hadn’t even had a decent jacket to keep himself warm, never mind a coat with a real fur collar. She could easily buy
him a pair of gloves and a scarf from that Iris Napier, her neighbour who was always going on at her to join her knitting circle. She might as well go home via St John’s Market, which was behind the theatre and off Charlotte Street, and order a turkey after all. She hadn’t been going to bother, seeing as Con would be down here at the theatre, Christmas Day or no Christmas Day, but she could invite Iris Napier in and if there was any turkey left, well, then she could make up some nice thick sandwiches for the boy, that was, of course, if he should come back, which he probably wouldn’t. But if he did, well, then she’d have a bit of something for him.

‘It was bad enough trying to shop for Christmas last year, but goodness knows how the Government expects us to manage this year, what with rationing coming in. Your father’s had something to say about the cost of a bottle of gin, I can tell you,’ Vi told Bella as they walked down Bold Street, Liverpool’s most exclusive shopping street.

Bella was barely listening to her mother’s monologue; instead she was watching the young woman – the young mother – on the other side of the road. Her coat was shabby, like the pram she was pushing. She looked tired and poor, no engagement ring shining about her thin gold wedding band. Bella looked down at her own hand; her wedding ring still shone richly, the diamonds in her engagement ring sparkling in the sudden ray of sunlight that broke through the greyness of the December afternoon.

She was a widow now, of course, and not a wife. She had lost her husband to one of Hitler’s bombs. Not that she missed or mourned him. Not one little bit. Why should she after the way he’d treated her, taking up with that stupid ugly Trixie Mayhew and telling people that he wanted a divorce from her so that he could marry.

Bella could just see the baby inside the shabby pram, a little girl obviously, seeing as she was dressed in a well-washed faded pink knitted jacket and bonnet. Bella could see the darkness of the baby’s hair showing through the pink bonnet. She would have had a baby if it hadn’t been for Alan trying to push her down the stairs. The too-familiar pain that she wished would go away, but which refused to do so, had started up again. Her mother didn’t like her talking about the baby. She said that it was best forgotten and that it had probably been for the best. Her mother was probably right. Just imagine if she’d ended up having a plain nasty-tempered baby like its father?

Her mother had interrupted her monologue to complain sharply, ‘Bella, you aren’t listening to me. I was just saying that I wish that Charlie would let me know what he’s planning to do for Christmas. I’ve written to him twice now.’

Bella couldn’t stop looking at the baby. She had huge brown eyes and a wide smile. If she’d been her baby she’d have had her dressed in something much better than washed-out and faded hand-me-downs. Was the mother too poor to buy her child decent clothes or did she just not care?

‘I want to go into Lewis’s, Bella.’

The road outside the main entrance to the store was busy with Christmas shoppers. There were no Christmas lights, of course, on account of the blackout, but the people of Liverpool were still trying to put a brave face on things and make the best of the festive season. The young woman with the pram stopped beside a man selling roasted chestnuts from a brazier. She looked cold and hungry. Bella huddled deeper into her good thick coat with its fur collar, and a label inside it that said that it had come from a famous store in New York. The coat had been a present from her parents and had come into the country as a ‘special order’ put in by her father to one of his many contacts in the Merchant Navy. Bella’s father had a business that fitted the pipe work into naval and merchant vessels and their household seldom went short of anything, rationing or no rationing.

‘I still don’t know why you’ve gone and ordered a turkey, Bella. After all, you’ll be coming to us for your Christmas dinner.’

‘I told you, Mummy, the turkey’s for the billetees.’

Vi’s mouth thinned with disapproval. ‘If I’d been you I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of buying a turkey for them.’

‘I was just trying to do the right thing, Mummy. You’re always saying how important it is, with Daddy being on the council and everything.’

Vi, who had picked up a carrot from the vegetable barrow in front of them, put it back without examining it to tell Bella sharply, ‘There’s doing the right thing by people, and there’s being overgenerous. If you ask me there’s no reason why that Jan shouldn’t
have got a turkey for his mother and sister himself. After all, he’s in the RAF, as he’s so fond of telling us all, so it’s not as though they’re destitute.’

‘Mummy, I’m getting cold standing here,’ Bella protested, stamping her feet in her boots and hugging her arms around herself as she changed the subject. She didn’t want to talk about her billetees. She wasn’t quite sure herself why she had gone to the trouble of ordering a Christmas turkey for them, as well as letting them practically have the run of the house, as she had done these last weeks. At least she would be at her mother’s for Christmas, and sleeping in her own childhood bedroom, so she wouldn’t have to listen to the mother and daughter going on and on like they did about Jan and how wonderful he was.

‘Come along then.’ Vi started to cross the road, having spied another vegetable barrow. Bella made to follow her and then stopped, opening her handbag to remove a ten-shilling note and then hurrying over to the girl with the pram.

‘Here, this is for the baby. Buy her something pretty,’ Bella told her.

The young mother’s face betrayed her shock, followed by anger.

‘I’m not a beggar, you know,’ she began.

‘Bella, what are you doing?’

The sound of her mother’s voice had Bella turning away from the pram.

‘Very well then, I’ll take it, but only because me husband’s been laid off from his ship on account of him not being well.’ She took the note, pushing it quickly into her pocket.

‘Bella …’

‘Coming, Mummy.’

‘What on earth were you doing?’ Vi demanded crossly when Bella caught up with her.

‘I was going to buy some chestnuts but then I decided not to bother,’ Bella fibbed. She had no idea why she had given in to that impulse to give the other woman something. She could still see the baby’s big brown eyes and sweet smile. The pain was back again. It was silly of her to feel like this. She hadn’t even wanted a baby really, had she? But she had been having one and now she wasn’t, and somehow that had left her feeling different and sad, even though she didn’t want to feel like that; as though there was an emptiness in her life and as though she really wished that she was still going to have a baby after all.

‘I just don’t know what I’m going to buy your father for Christmas, Bella. He’s not easily pleased at the best of times, and with this war on …’

‘You could always buy him something to water down his gin.’

Vi’s face took on a high colour and she gave her daughter the kind of displeased look she normally reserved for others. Vi had spoiled her daughter and boasted about her to everyone who would listen, but having a daughter who was widowed, and, even worse, whose husband had been carrying on before his death and threatening to leave her, was not easy to boast about.