Hannah massey (15 page)

"That's for him," he said; "him and his parables, I'll push one down his bloody throat the first chance I get.

"You weren't content with tiddlers," he said, 'but must try to ram carp into your jam jars. " I'd like to carp him, be god I would."

"Is that all you got out of him?" Hannah's voice was bitter.

"That's all."

"Well." Broderick had loosened his hold on Rosie, and now Y

he looked down at the hearth-rug and swung his head from side to side before saying, "You couldn't expect the chap to do much more about it, could you now?" Then lifting his eyes to his son, The asked, "And what did Mr. Nicholas say?"

Bamy looked away from his father before he answered, "He said nowt to me, but he told Harry Brown that if the boss hadn't been a fair-minded chap who didn't like trouble we'd have been up in court, every damned one of us."

"So they were on to it really?" said Arthur.

"What do you think?" Bamy replied bitterly. Then squaring his shoulders he added, "Aw, to hell! It might be the best thing that's happened to me. I've had an idea in me head for some time, and now I'll likely do something' about it."

"What is it?" said Hannah. Then turning to the table again she picked up the ladle, saying, "You can talk while you cat, there's good food being wasted. Come, sit up all of you."

When they were all served and Hannah herself had sat down, (he looked at Bamy and asked, "Well, now, what's this idea of yours? Spit it out.

Unlike me family, I welcome new ideas. "

Bamy did not pick up this last remark but said simply, "It's Leonard's shop, you know round in Brookland Street, just off the market."

"The electric shop you mean?" said Arthur.

"Aye." Bamy nodded.

"Well, he died about three months ago, and since then his wife's been trying to sell. It would have gone like hot cakes a few years ago but now things are tight. And there's another thing, most people who take on places like that know damn all about the inside of the things they sell, but me being able to make Boost of me own stuff, well I've al way felt if I had the chance I would make a go of it. I know I would." He turned and looked at Hannah, and Hannah looked at him for a moment before dropping her eyes to her plate and beginning to eat.

"You don't think much of it, Ma?" Bamy's voice was nervous, quiet.

"Well, I know nowt about it yet, do I? But a shop. Aw, shops are tricky businesses."

"But people make good livin's out of them. Look at them in the main thoroughfares, with their fifteen hundred pound cars changed every year, and their trips abroad. Look at the Pamells that started just after the war with that little furniture shop;

they're wiling in it now; they've got a chain of over twenty of them.

"

"We're far past the war, boy." Hannah went on eating steadily.

"I think it's an idea." Broderick wagged his fork towards Bamy.

"I do indeed. There's no one cleverer than you with the innards of wirelesses and televisions."

Bamy smiled at his father.

"It's only a small place, but it's got a good stock. I've been in once or twice lately, just looking round."

"How much do they want for it?" asked Arthur.

"Well, the shop's on lease." Bamy swallowed.

"The rent four pounds a week, and rates." Again he swallowed.

"But what will she want for the stock?" said Shanc.

"Five hundred pounds." It was a bald statement.

"Five hundred pounds!" The sound seemed to shoot from the top of Hannah's grey hair.

"It's not a lot really, not to get a start." Bamy's voice was low and his tone slightly on the defensive.

"Anyway, I could raise a bit, I dare say, if it's necessary. How much have I got put by, Ma?"

"How much have you got put by!" Hannah screwed up her eyes at him as if she didn't quite take in the question.

"Aye." His tone was sharp now.

"How much have you saved for me?"

"Oh that.,.. that. Well now, I can't tell you off-hand, I don't reckon it up every day, but I should say on the spur of the moment something between fifty and seventy-five pounds."

"WHAT!"

Bamy pushed his chair back from the table and the sound on the linoleum was like a stone rasping glass, and it affected them all.

Except perhaps Bamy himself, for he was being affected in another

way.

"Aw, come off it, Ma. You pulling me leg or sum mat I've been in steady work for over three years now and never earned less than fifteen a week, and a damn sight more most of the time."

"Now look here, look here, me lad." Hannah, too, had risen from the table, the knife in her hand, and she wagged it at him.

"What was the arrangement, tell me that? Divided in three, we all said. One part for your keep and your working clothes, another for your pocket, and tother, to put by and to buy your good things out of."

"I know all about that, Ma. But what working clothes have you bought me, I ask you that?"

"Two pairs of dungarees you've had, and the oilskin overalls for your motorbike."

"Aw, my God, that's over two years ago, Ma."

"And then out of your savings as you call them, you've had two suits, fifteen pounds a piece they were, two pairs of shoes to go with them, not counting a number of shirts and other odds and ends."

"All right, all right, Ma." He was holding himself in check now.

"Say I've had fifty pounds worth of clothes...."

"Fifty pounds! Begod, you're a cheap jack. Make it a hundred and you'll be nearer the mark."

Bamy closed his eyes and thumped his forehead with his fist, and still with his eyes closed and his fist to his head, he said, "All right, say a hundred pounds. Take a hundred pounds off two hundred and fifty and that leaves a hundred and fifty. And that's for only one year.

You've been saving for me for three years; I reckoned on four hundred pounds up there. " He thumbed the ceiling.

"Or nearer five."

"God Almighty and his Holy Mother!" Hannah collapsed with a thud on to the chair.

"Four hundred pounds.,. nearly five!" She appealed from one face to another of her family, but when she looked at Rosie, her daughter had her face turned away. And now with her arms across the table, her

hands outstretched, supplicating, towards them, she asked, "Who's paid for the fine new furniture we've got, and the carpets that are in every nook and cranny of this house bar this room? And who's paid for the new bedding?"

Bamy shouted back at her, "I know, I know all that, but we've all had to fork out towards them. It wouldn't all come out of mine, would

it?... Now look here, Ma." His voice dropped.

"I should have a few hundred up there."

Rosie, being unable to stand any more, picked up her plate from the table and went into the kitchen, there to see Hughic standing by the stove. It was evident from the look on his face that he had heard a good deal of what had happened in the living-room, also that in the hubbub his entry had gone unnoticed.

As Rosie put her plate on the table she whispered, "Oh, Hughie!" and the words were laden with shame. At this moment she was not only

ashamed of her mother, she felt she disliked her, even hated her.

Nearly three thousand pounds in that drawer upstairs, and denying Bamy his bit of savings.

Surely she couldn't think the lads were so stupid. But apparently she did. She had just to yell and shout and point to what she had bought and she could convince them of where the. money had gone.

"Don't let it trouble you," Hughie was whispering back at her now.

"But, Hughie, she's got it." She did not feel that she was giving her mother away to him by saying this.

"I know, I know." One eyebrow moved up. It seemed to tell her that he knew as much as she did.

As Hannah's voice reached a blaring peak, he pushed Rosie gently from the table, saying, "Go on in, go on." And she turned quickly from him and did as he bade her. She knew he didn't want her mother to come in and see them together. As she entered the living-room Hannah was again appealing to the family as a whole, crying at them, "I want the few pounds saved to get us out of this. We can't move up the Hill on

goodwill."

"Who the hell wants to move up the Hill?" Bamy was squarely confronting his mother now.

"Here's one who doesn't. I've told you afore I don't want to leave here, and I'm not going to; we've made enough moves up the ladder I think to satisfy you."

When he stopped speaking there was a quivering, uneasy silence in the room. And then Hannah, her voice now quiet but intense, said, "Of all the ungrateful sods in this world, I've bred a bunch of them. For

years I've slaved the living daylights ouf of me self and what for?

What for, I ask you? To make you respected, looked up to. " The tone was rising, and as Rosie passed from the room through the hall on her way upstairs the crash of her mother's fist on the table and the sound of the jangling dishes caused her to start and shrink as if from a blow.

Up in her room, she looked at the evidence of her mother's

generosity.

The two new cases, the two dresses, the shoes and stockings and

underwear, not to mention the coat she had worn to-day. She had spent forty-seven pounds as if they were pennies, and joyed in doing it. Yet there she was downstairs denying Bamy his savings, and all because she was determined to have her way and buy the flat on Brampton Hill.

There wasn't a doubt in Rosie's mind but that Bamy would make a go of a wireless and television shop if he got the chance.

"But what prestige would there be in such a shop in a back street for her mother? There would be nothing to show off or brag about in

that.

There was an easy chair in the room that hadn't been there when she left this morning. Her mother must have humped it up at least two

flights of stairs. She sat on the side of her bed and looked at it; evidence of a reasoning she knew now that had sent her eldest brother, Patrick, to Australia, and Colin to Canada, that had made Michael leave a good job here for one in Cornwall at half the wage. The same

reasoning that had frustrated Dennis for years and made him bitter, the reasoning that had scorned his intelligence. The reasoning that

pointed the finger of sin at Arthur's association with a married woman and which had intimidated him so much that he was really afraid to do what he desired, and go and live with her. The reasoning that was now determined to deprive Bamy of making a living in the way he wanted to.

The reasoning had not yet touched Shane or Jimmy simply because, as yet, they had made no protest against her. The reasoning that made fiddling almost a virtue every day in the week except Sunday.

Then there was Hughie and Karen. Her mother's reasoning, Rosie

thought, had made very little, or no impact, on Karen, for Karen had in her a great deal of Hannah herself. Added to this, she had a sharp intelligence. This advantage had, it was supposed, been inherited from Karen's father, a mysterious figure, who was never mentioned, and who had been known only to Moira.

And Hughie? The one person in the house who had always borne the

weight of her mother's spleen, derision and unreasonable reasoning.

And in his case one had to ask. Why? Why?

Now and again over the years she had wondered, but just vaguely, about Hughie. Why, for instance, did he stand her mother? Why did he always take a back seat? Why did he scarcely open his mouth in the house? To a stranger in the house he must have appeared like a numbskull. But Hughie was no numbskull. She had always known it, and that had been made evident in the back shop yesterday morning. Look at that piece of writing. Who would think Hughie could work things out like that?

Certainly no one in this house.

What, she thought now, would be her mother's reaction when she learned he had come into money? She could almost feel the bitterness and rage that the irony of the situation would arouse in her at a time when she needed money, real money, to further the ambition of her life, when the last person in the world she could have relied on to further that

ambition was now. rolling in it. Well, if not rolling in it, he must have come into enough to set him on his feet.

Rosie rubbed her hand up and down her cheek. She only hoped she wasn't in the house when he told her mother. For no matter how she felt about her she wouldn't be able to bear watching her reaping what she had sown.

But Rosie was in the house when, later on Tuesday, Hughie told her mother.

In the lull that followed the exodus of the men to work Hannah was busying herself with the washing-up and tidying of the rooms. When Rosie came downstairs Hannah just bade her good-morning and asked how she had slept. Her manner, tellingly quiet, forbade any questioning at this point, so nothing concerning last night's row or the bottom drawer of the chest was mentioned until sometime later in the morning, when, dressed for outdoors, Rosie went to her and said, "I'm going into Newcastle, Ma, to have a look round."

"You're going out in this?" Hannah was in the kitchen hacking at a large shin of beef, and wiping the blood from her hands, she added,

"It's snowing again, lass. I thought you said Wednesday."

"Oh, there are plenty of other places to try."

As Rosie went towards the back door Hannah said appealingly, "Aw, come out the front, come out the front, lass." As if it made just that difference which way her daughter went out, she led the way into the hall; then, with her hand on the front- door latch, she turned to her and said quietly, "There's no hurry, you know, lass; there's no hurry.

In fact, I don't see why you want to take a job outside at all. You could give me a hand in the house, and we could come to an arrangement.

" She nodded knowingly.

"There I am, paying that Mrs.

Pratt a pound every Friday to do down, and be god there's never a time I haven't to go behind her after she's gone. "

"Thanks, Ma, but I... I couldn't... Anyway, I couldn't stay in the house all day. You see, I've been used to going out, and I want to earn my own living."