Jam and Roses (56 page)

She looked up into Elsie’s serious, sharp-chinned face and at Amy’s careless beauty and felt nothing but gratitude, realizing now that they’d both risked their lives to save her and her child. She pulled them closer, remembering something her mother had once said, in another lifetime or so it seemed.

‘Be friends with your sisters,’ she’d begged. ‘You’ll need each other one day.’

It was many days before Milly realized the full extent of Amy’s heroism. She learned it not from Amy, but from Bertie, who, once she was back in Storks Road, nursed her and Jimmy as tenderly as though they were both children. He told her how Amy had braved the strong currents and deadly undertow at Fountain Stairs, and how Elsie had found a superhuman strength to pull all three of them up the stairs. When she tried to thank her sisters, Amy had shrugged and reminded her of all the times Milly had told her off for coming home with wet underwear and dripping hair. Elsie insisted she’d done nothing, but Milly remembered how fearful she’d been of the river, sometimes not wanting even to look at it. She could only guess at the courage it had taken to immerse herself in its waters.

Jimmy wouldn’t leave her side and she didn’t want him to. Her strength had been sapped and the quantity of filthy Thames water she’d consumed left her with a fever, but in spite of Bertie’s protests, after three days she determined to get up from her sick bed. Her life and her child had been given back to her. She wasn’t going to waste it lying in bed. Besides, she wanted to see her mother. She’d been vaguely aware of her presence at her bedside at the Settlement, and had battled to keep her eyes open, and she remembered glimpsing the thin cut at her mother’s throat. She’d tried to raise herself up.

‘The old man?’ she’d managed to ask, before collapsing back into sleep.

Now as she moved slowly around her bedroom, being helped by Bertie into her clothes and shoes, she realized with a start that her mother hadn’t been to see her and Jimmy since their return to Storks Road.

‘Has Mum been round, while I’ve been laid up?’ she asked Bertie.

‘No, love.’ He was fumbling with her buttoned shoe strap and she bent to do it herself, but her head swam and she found herself gripping his shoulder to steady herself.

‘There, you’re not ready to get up!’ Bertie said.

‘I’m fine, just a bit dizzy. Why hasn’t she been round?’

‘Who?’

‘Mum! She’d normally be here wanting to take over.’

‘Amy’s been giving her the news. You haven’t really been up to visitors.’

Something in his tone made her suspicious. Bertie was an open book, his mobile features reflecting every emotion. Now she could see him struggling to hide his blushes as he bent his head and started buttoning the other shoe.

‘Bertie Hughes, you’re a terrible liar. What’s going on?’

He moved to sit on the bed beside her. Taking her hand, he stroked it gently. ‘I haven’t told you anything because you’ve barely been able to lift your head from the pillow. You’ve been in no fit state.’

His characteristic slowness was agitating her even more than usual. ‘Has something happened to her? Just tell me!’

He paused for a moment, then sighed. ‘Your mother’s had some troubles of her own, love.’

October 1928
–May 1929

‘Dead? How? At the river?’ If she had been the cause of it, she would have to live with the consequences, but she wouldn’t have,
couldn’t
have done anything differently. Her mouth had gone dry and all her determination to get up and face the world had drained away. Her legs were weaker than the beef tea Bertie had been spooning down her mouth for the last three days. She wished her brain felt more connected to her body and she wished her feelings were more connected to her brain. It was as if the river had melted all the normal everyday connections that allowed her to function properly in the world, and she realized, with a jolt, that she had begun to cry. The old man was dead, and she was crying. How could that be? The truth was, she had so often wished him dead it had become second nature, but now she began to suspect that all along, she had only really wished him – different. The old man had been her father... once.

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Bertie said, reading her mind.

‘No?’ But she had left the old man lying in a pool of his own blood; she had sliced the back of his legs and hobbled him. She had left him, bleeding to death for all she knew, on that barge.

‘No!’ he said with emphasis. ‘You did what you had to do to protect our son and I’m proud of you. Your father killed himself.’

‘How?’

‘We don’t know if it was deliberate or an accident, but he drowned.’

‘In the river?’

Bertie shook his head. ‘Not the river. It was at Neckinger Mills.’

‘In the lime pit,’ she whispered, a shiver raising every hair on her body as the image flashed into her mind of the old man, face down in a square pit of liquid lime; hairless, bloated white flesh already pulpy and softening.

‘Strike me dumb, how did you know that?’

‘Elsie had a dream, ages ago, that he’d drowned in one of the lime pits.’

Bertie whistled. ‘Looks like Polly Witch got it right this time!’

Milly put her hands to her face, rubbing at her eyes, wanting to erase the horrible image. She shuddered. ‘I wouldn’t have wished it on him, not even after everything he’s done to us. It’s horrible, Bertie.’ And she leaned into him, letting the bitter tears fall for her unloving father.

‘But how could he have even walked, after what I did to him?’ she asked after a while.

‘I think all the blood made things look worse than they were. Some people saw him later on Sunday, walking past Neckinger Mills. He was bloody and hobbling, and looked half mad they said. Then later on, some kids saw him climbing
out
of the tannery, over the wall next to the pits.’

Milly knew the place. It was a fairly low wall they had used to run along as children, and the grid of lime and tanning pits beyond were visible from there.

‘They said he looked drunk, had a bottle in his hand, started shouting at them to clear off, but then he just fell back and disappeared. We think he must have toppled back into one of the pits.’

‘But why would he go there of all places? There’s no reason to it all.’

‘Oh, there’s a reason, Milly. It turns out he’d been hanging around the place for weeks on and off, even asked for his old job back, and when the foreman refused him, he started getting abusive, saying he’d torch the place.’

‘I’m not surprised he’s been back for a while. I never told you, but I felt as if someone was following me, back when we had all that fog.’

‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

‘Well, I never saw anyone, but now I know it was him.’ She shuddered, thinking of all the times when she’d been at his mercy, whirling round in the fog to find nothing there at all. ‘But he never damaged anything at the tannery?’

‘I think he probably got distracted. After they fished out his body, the police found the offices broken into and the directors’ drinks cabinet empty.’

It was a pitiful end, and now she was no longer at the old man’s mercy, she found she had room for her own. Being turned away from the tannery must have seemed the last nail in the coffin of whatever dignity he still possessed.

‘Do you know what he said to me on the barge, while he was dangling my poor baby over the side? He said it was living in a houseful of women that ruined him.’

‘Oh, that’s a load of old tosh, Milly.’

‘Not really, he blamed us for being alive, while our two brothers were dead, and he blamed Wilf going away on us too, said the women had taken all the jobs...’

Bertie held her tighter. ‘Wilf left because he couldn’t stand your father. And there’s only one thing ruined the old man, my love, and that’s the drink. So there’s to be no more talk of blame, hear me?’

‘I need to go and see Mum. She’s had to go through all this on her own and I wasn’t there to help.’

‘Not alone, she’s had your sisters.’

Her sisters. Suddenly she felt lighter, suddenly the phrase sounded full of promise. Now their common enemy was gone for good, perhaps they really could be bound together by something other than fear.

‘Where are they?’

‘They’re at the undertaker’s.’

The old man’s funeral was discreet and painful. Her mother had insisted everything be done properly, just as though he’d been a real husband and father. And Milly understood that it was as much for her own sake that her mother wanted it this way. Her life with him had been one long humiliation, always to be referred to as ‘poor Mrs Colman’, always to have been powerless, fighting for a respectability that he inevitably sabotaged; it had eaten away at her native pride, but hadn’t destroyed it. Now the burying of him was perhaps the first independent act she’d carried out in her adult life, and Milly had to admit, she did it well.

Everyone was decently dressed in black. The men’s suits came out of the Common Thread Clothing Club, and Milly and Elsie made every other black garment. There was a Mass and a proper Christian burial, as his death had been ruled an accident, not deliberate suicide. Milly stood through it all with a rigidity that made her muscles tremble and her jaw ache. The few tears she’d had to spare for her father had already been shed. There was no crying at the old man’s funeral.

After the burial they went back to Arnold’s Place, where a few of his more sober workmates, and some of the neighbours, were given sandwiches and nothing stronger than tea. Admittedly the crockery and furniture had to be borrowed from Storks Road, but afterwards Milly could see a sort of grim pride in her mother’s face, when Mrs Knight said her goodbyes and added, ‘All very respectable, Mrs Colman, very respectable.’

The baby’s cries were insistent and piercing. Milly rolled over in bed and curled against the curve of Bertie’s back.

‘Thank gawd I don’t have to get up for this one.’

‘Your turn’ll come again soon enough.’ He was awake.

She pulled him over and laid her head on his chest. She was happy. Elsie had brought home her new baby girl just before Christmas. They had called her Ivy, not just for the season, but because, as Elsie said, it was a plant that would flourish almost anywhere. The baby had certainly thrived and if her lungs were anything to go by, she had the constitution of an ox. Milly could only think it came from the Clark side, for the child had very little of Elsie’s fairy-like fragility.

But Milly’s happiness had another cause, for shortly after the new baby arrived she found that she was expecting another child herself. Bertie’s happiness, she knew, was tinged with worry. She had tried to reassure Elsie that babies didn’t cost much, but now the reality was hitting home. Bob had been out of work for a year and her own husband hadn’t worked full time for almost three. If she was honest, her own happiness was sometimes interrupted by fear that their precarious ark would spring a leak at the worst possible time. But she took strength from the fact that the Common Thread was still thriving.

This morning, the two men were going to try for some labouring jobs with Bermondsey Borough Council. Their slum clearance programme was well under way and the dilapidated houses around Cherry Garden Street had been demolished. Finally, the area had begun to reflect a little of that old pleasure garden, filled with cherry trees, which had once graced the banks of the Thames centuries ago. Soot-encrusted hovels had been replaced with an incongruously pretty estate of cottages, boasting their own front gardens – the result of a long-held dream of their MP, Dr Salter, to replace all the slums of Bermondsey with something that people could be proud to live in. Milly and Bertie had walked around the flagship streets of Wilson’s Grove, marvelling at what previously had seemed an impossibility: in the shadow of factories and wharves, a little garden village had grown up.

But, not long after the cottages were finished, Bertie had heard at the Labour Institute that the economic Depression was threatening to put an end to Dr Salter’s dream. The council had no more money to build garden estates, and though the worst of the slums were continuing to be demolished, from now on they would be replaced by flats. Neither of the men were skilled bricklayers or carpenters, but if they couldn’t contribute to building the new, they could certainly help demolish the old. That task was easy, as the old houses were collapsing under their own decrepit weight anyway.

Today they were going to look for demolition work in the area known as Downtown, in Rotherhithe. Here the houses lining the river had been amongst those worst hit by the January floods. The high waters had poured through already broken windows, undermining foundations dug more than a century before. Nothing could save them and nobody wanted them to be saved.

When she heard a soft snore coming from Bertie, she nudged him. ‘You can’t go back to sleep.’

A pearly February light was beginning to filter through the net curtains and the men had to make an early start of it.

‘I wasn’t!’ he protested.

‘Come on, move yourself. I’ll go and get the breakfast started.’

She saw the two men off with high hopes, but that evening when they returned, weary, wet and caked in what looked like Thames mud, their news wasn’t encouraging. They had been lucky to get a day’s work; there were hundreds of skilled bricklayers, carpenters and plumbers queuing up in front of them just for the chance to wield a sledgehammer. Milly could see they were both crestfallen.

‘Let’s get the bath in,’ she suggested.

Later, after the water had boiled in the copper and the grey tin bath had been filled, she leaned over to soap Bertie’s back. His hands rested on his drawn-up knees, but they were not the hands of the man she had married, soft, white, sensitive hands, used to weighing out flour and jam and sugar, used to writing entries in the ledger. Over the past two years, his hands had turned into those of a casual labourer; she felt their calluses when he cupped her face or stroked them the length of her back. His hands were not the only thing that had changed. The relentless rejections had sapped him of so much of that irreverent jauntiness which had made her love him. But she thanked God for that optimistic core, which remained. Suddenly overwhelmed with love for him, she embraced his wet, soapy body.