Laceys of Liverpool (10 page)

wondering if you’d gone or not. I didn’t hear the door

slam.’ John put Cormac down and reached for his coat. ‘I’m going now. By the way,’ he said gruffly, ‘you have the bed from now on. I’ll use the settee.’

The Docky was always busy. The offices of the shipping merchants, the importers and exporters, were closed and there was less traffic than during the day. But at seven o’clock the pavements were still full of seamen and sailors of myriad nationalities. Behind the high walls of the docks activity could be heard – the shouts and thuds as ships that could have come from anywhere in the world were being loaded or offloaded in the bright glare of floodlights.

Particles of ice were being blown crazily about, this way and that, by the bitter wind that blew in from the Mersey. John could hear the water slushing noisily against the walls of the docks. He drew up his scarf around his neck.

He arrived at the Arcadia, where two small children, a boy and a girl, were cuddled against each other on the steps outside, shivering in their thin clothes. He gave them a penny each.

‘Thanks, mister,’ the boy said with remarkable cheerfulness.

Clare was sitting at the same table as the night before, her back to him. John’s heart lifted and he began to push his way through the crowded room. He’d been looking forward to this moment all day, a day when he’d felt at ease with himself for the first time in months. He slid on to the bench beside her. ‘Hello, there.’

She frowned. At first he thought she was annoyed with him for coming until he recognised the frown was one of disbelief. Her cheeks went pink and he realised she was pleased and flattered that he was back.

She nodded furiously. ‘Hello.’ She hesitated, as she had done the night before, then reached for his hand. ‘Glad,’ she whispered. ‘Glad you’re here.’ And then she smiled and the smile made her look almost beautiful.

John smiled back and thought what a miracle it was that he had met a woman who was as damaged as himself and that they could make each other smile.

Cora Lacey came into the salon at the end of Alice’s first week. The hairdresser’s was just about to close. Fionnuala was cleaning the sinks and Cormac was kneeling on a chair in front of the big till ringing up numbers.

‘Had a busy week?’ Cora enquired.

‘I’ve been run off me feet if you must know.’ Alice collapsed under a dryer. ‘Thank the Lord it’s Sat’day. I’ve just sent our Orla and Maeve round for fish and chips. I haven’t the strength to make the tea.’

‘Good,’ Cora said with satisfaction. It meant the takings must be considerable. ‘Shove over, son.’ She gave Cormac a little nudge with her hip and he reluctantly climbed off the chair. ‘Is this all there is?’ She glanced suspiciously at her sister-in-law. ‘Not a single note?’

‘The notes are at home,’ Alice explained. ‘I empty the till each night, don’t I? And I hardly ever take notes, anyroad, except for perms and I didn’t do one today.’

‘Then I’ll come back to the house with you to collect me share.’

Fionnuala had stopped work to listen. She glared at her aunt whom she had never liked. ‘What’s she on about, Mam?’

‘It’s none of your business, luv.’

‘Why is she taking money out the till? It’s
our
salon.’

‘Your Auntie Cora put money into the business,’ Alice explained patiently. Her eldest daughter usually managed to test her patience sorely. ‘She’s entitled to some of the profit.’

‘But there won’t be profit for weeks and weeks, Mam,’ Fion exclaimed. ‘You said so only the other day, what with the price of paint and everything.’

‘Yes, but . . .’ Alice paused. Fion was right. The cost of improvements shouldn’t just be borne by her, but shared with Cora, too. And the wages – she wondered if she was entitled to claim a wage for herself? Oh, Lord! She must be the stupidest woman in the world for not having grasped the blatantly obvious.

She swallowed hard – Cora always made her feel dead nervous – and said in a firm voice, ‘I’m afraid you can’t just come in and help yourself. I need to work things out first, what comes in and what goes out, like.’

‘And what exactly goes out apart from the price of a few tins of paint?’ Cora wanted to know. She had been expecting to go home with a few quid in her pocket and was annoyed at being thwarted.

Alice was about to reel off the things she’d bought and those she intended buying, when Fionnuala said aggressively, ‘She said she’d write them down, didn’t she? It’s
our
hairdresser’s. We don’t have to answer to you for everything we buy.’

‘Shush, luv.’ Alice squeezed her daughter’s arm.

The door opened and Orla and Maeve came in, each carrying a parcel of fish and chips wrapped in greasy newspaper.

‘Shall we take them home and put them in the oven, Mam?’ Maeve enquired.

‘Please, luv. We’ll be there in a minute.’

Orla’s bright, curious eyes went from her mother to
her aunt, then to her sister’s red, angry face. ‘What’s going on?’

‘There’s nothing going on, luv. Just get them fish and chips home before they turn cold.’

‘We’ll wait for you.’ Orla and Maeve came into the salon and stood alongside their mother. Cormac bent his head against his mam’s hip and Alice idly began to stroke the soft fair hair.

Faced with the girls’ hostile eyes, it dawned on Cora that she wasn’t going to find their gormless mother the easy touch she’d expected. She also felt disturbed at being presented with such a united front, conscious she had no one on her side. She wished she’d brought Maurice so she could stroke his hair the way Alice was stroking Cormac’s and she wouldn’t look so very much alone.

‘I’ll be in Monday for a statement,’ she muttered.

‘It might not be ready by then.’ Fionnuala smirked. She was thoroughly enjoying protecting Mam from the horrible Cora. It was
her
who had reminded Mam the hairdresser’s wouldn’t show a profit for ages,
she
who had given it its name. She felt annoyed and very unappreciated when Mam tugged her sleeve and told her again to ‘shush’.

‘I’ll have the statement ready for Monday,’ Alice promised.

She had been born, Clare informed him, when her mother was forty-seven. By then her three brothers were in their twenties; all married, all living in different parts of the country. They rarely came home. Her parents’ marriage had broken down years before. John was astonished to learn her father had been, possibly still was, a solicitor’s clerk.

‘My mother said she only had me because he raped
her. She hated me right from the start.’ She conveyed this in a mixture of gestures, facial expressions, sounds and the pad on which she wrote. Her full name was Clare Frances Carlson. ‘They were ashamed of people knowing I was their daughter.’

She’d been sent to a special boarding school, returning home at fourteen when her education was complete. Within months she had run away – she came from Widnes – but couldn’t think of a job someone like her could do apart from cleaning. Even then, ‘People don’t like this.’ She pointed to her mouth, then wrote, ‘They think I’m an imbecile.’

‘You’re anything but.’ John took her hands in his. She was a very clever young woman – he wouldn’t have known how to spell imbecile. There were books on the sideboard, pencil drawings on the walls that he was surprised to learn she’d done herself. They were mostly of the Dock Road, which could be seen from the window – the traffic, the teeming pavements, the funnels of ships protruding from behind the dock walls. A few were sketches of the crowded interior of the Arcadia that she’d done from memory.

Her short life story was told without a shred of self-pity. She hadn’t drifted into prostitution, no one had coerced her. She just heard it went on and it seemed a good way for someone like her to make a living. She didn’t like it, but she didn’t hate it either.

‘Surely there were other things that you could have done,’ John said, conscious of a note of reproof in his voice.

‘What would you have done if you’d been born with your face like that?’ she scribbled, underlining the ‘born’.

For some reason he seized the pencil. ‘Hidden from the world,’ he wrote.

‘That’s what I’m doing in my way,’ she wrote back.

‘You deserve better,’ he wrote in turn. He’d never been greedy for money. A few extra bob a week wouldn’t have come amiss for the odd luxury, but as a skilled tradesman he earned slightly more than the average man. There’d always been enough to keep his family comfortably warm and fed, and the bit Alice got from hairdressing was merely the icing on the cake. But he longed to take Clare away from this run-down house full of tarts, find her somewhere respectable to live, support her, so that she could come off the game and belong to him alone.

But without money none of these things was possible. It gnawed at his gut, knowing that before he came, or after he’d gone, she was in the Arcadia touting for customers, yet he had no right to ask her to stop. He couldn’t have afforded to see her more than once or twice a week, had she not refused to let him pay after the first night.

‘I said you’re different. We’re friends,’ she wrote, turning away the five shillings he offered. She was a curious mixture of hardness and innocence.

He thought ‘friends’ described their relationship perfectly. They were friends drawn together by adversity and loneliness. At the back of his mind there was always the awareness that a year ago he wouldn’t have dreamt of going near the Arcadia or sleeping with a prostitute. He had told Clare he was married, but still worried that he was using her. Having broken through her hard shell, he was taking advantage of the soft, generous woman inside. He worried that he might hurt her, let her down, that she would become too dependent on him. If things ever improved between him and Alice, for instance . . . But – he sighed – things never would, particularly now that she was so deeply involved with that damned hairdresser’s.

The nightly visits to the pub were doing John the world of good. Alice only wished he’d gone before. He was nicer to the girls, and after tea he’d put Cormac on his knee and discuss the things he’d done that day at school. He’d even deigned to speak to his wife in a civil manner, suggesting he build bunk beds for the middle bedroom.

‘The girls are getting too big for three in a bed,’ he said and actually smiled.

Alice opened her mouth to say that Maeve had been sleeping with her since she’d occupied the double bed, but quickly closed it. ‘Them bunk beds sound the gear, luv,’ she said warmly. ‘The girls will be dead pleased.’

‘I’ll get the wood this weekend.’

‘John!’ She laid her hand on his arm and was dismayed when he quickly moved away as if disgusted by her touch. She regarded him sadly, thinking how much she’d once loved him, then felt even more dismayed at the realisation she didn’t love him now. He had spurned her too often. He had driven her away.

‘What?’

Alice sighed. ‘Oh, nothing.’

‘Who’d like another mince pie?’ Alice cried.

‘Me!’

‘Apart from you, Fionnuala Lacey. I thought it was your intention to lose a few pounds. Any minute now and you’ll need a bigger overall.’ The overalls were lilac nylon – ‘lilac’ sounded so much nicer than ‘mauve’, Alice thought, more tasteful.

‘Oh,
Mam
!’

Alice virtually danced across the room to pass the plate beneath the noses of the three women under the dryers. They each took one.

‘You look happy, luv,’ Mrs Curran remarked. ‘Did you make these yourself?’

‘I was up till midnight baking,’ Alice said cheerfully. ‘It’s home-made mincemeat too. I managed to get a pound of sultanas in Costigan’s. I think it’s disgusting. The war’s been over six whole years and the country’s still on rations. Do you fancy a drop of sherry with the pie?’

‘Ta all the same, luv, but no. Drink plays havoc with me gallstones. I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea, though.’

‘Fion, make Mrs Curran a cup of tea, please.’

‘On the Empire, she was,’ Patsy O’Leary was saying as she combed out Mrs Glaister’s wet hair ready for Alice to set. ‘All the dancing schools in Liverpool took part, but our Daisy was the star of the show. Wasn’t she, Alice?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Alice dutifully lied.

Fionnuala looked at her mother and winked. Alice must have been asked the same question a hundred times since the concert last week. Daisy had been good, but a few other girls and one or two boys had been better.

‘Poor Myrtle, she wouldn’t recognise this place if she saw it now,’ Mrs Glaister said sadly.

‘Do you ever hear from her, luv?’

‘No. I always send a Christmas card, but I haven’t had one back for years. I still miss her, even after all this time. She was a good friend, Myrtle.’ Mrs Glaister’s old eyes grew watery. ‘I reckon she must have passed on.’ She crossed herself.

‘It happens to us all,’ Patsy O’Leary commented.

‘Fion,’ Alice called, ‘put a gown on Mrs Evans. I’ll be ready for her soon.’

‘Come on, Mrs Evans, luv,’ Fionnuala said in a sickly, sugary voice, and proceeded to help the woman, who was barely fifty and as fit as a fiddle, to her feet, and shove her arms inside the sleeves of the lilac gown as if she hadn’t the strength to lift the arms herself.