Monday Girl (5 page)

‘Thanks, Lena, but I doubt if you’ll ever see us again, unless you two manage to come back.’ Anne swallowed.

‘Good luck, anyway, and bon voyage.’

‘Yes, and I hope you’ve a good trip across,’ Renee added, unnecessarily, amid rather subdued laughter.

‘I hope everything goes well for them,’ Anne said when they had gone. ‘It’s a big step to take.’

They told George about Bill and Lena when he came home, shortly afterwards, and he was genuinely pleased for them. ‘I’m glad he had the guts to make his own decision. I’m going to have to make up my mind about something, too, so I’m taking a few days’ holiday to think it over. I’ll be leaving on Wednesday, Anne.’

‘That’ll be a nice break for you,’ she said. ‘You haven’t had a holiday since you came here, and that’s over a year and a half ago. When will you be back?’

‘Next Sunday. The message-boy’s too young to help Frank Leslie in the shop, and the butcher I’m taking on starts another job on the Monday, so I can only take a few days.’ The door opened and Jack Thomson walked in, back from seeing his mother in Peterhead, so he had to be told the exciting news about Bill and Lena, too. ‘Bill doesna take long about making up his mind, does he?’ he laughed. ‘Well, good luck to them. They deserve it for taking the plunge. It’s never a case of ‘‘everything comes to him who waits’’.

Not these days, at any rate.’

‘You’re right there,’ muttered George, as he turned to go up to his own room.

Anne sat for a few minutes, then rose to her feet. ‘I think I’ll get off to bed as well. And you’re late, Renee. Remember you’ve got school in the morning.’

‘I’ll be up in a few minutes.’ The girl was hanging back in the hope of seeing Fergus Cooper before she went to bed.

Jack leaned back in the settee. ‘I don’t know when Fergus’ll be in,’ he remarked, as if he’d read her thoughts.

‘I saw him down the town just now with a girl.’

Renee’s heart sank. She’d never considered the possibility of her hero having a girl already. ‘Has he been going with her for long?’ She tried to sound off-hand, and hoped that Jack would know the answer, since he and Fergus shared a room.

‘He changes his girls as often as he changes his shirt, but this one’s lasted a few weeks.’

‘Is he . . . serious about her, would you say?’ She had to ask, although she dreaded the possible reply.

‘Looks like it. Are you disappointed?’ He was only teasing the thirteen-year-old girl.

‘Oh, no!’ Renee said it rather too vehemently, then felt obliged to prevent Jack from stumbling on the truth. I was only asking. We might have another wedding if we’re lucky.’ Unlucky would be more like it, she thought, but kept a smile on her face. It came back to her how she’d woven fantasies about Jack before Fergus came on the scene, and she realised that she still liked him a lot, but not as much as Fergus.

The sound of a key in the Yale lock made her heart start hammering, and she hoped it didn’t show in her expression. ‘Here’s Romeo now,’ Jack said as the other man came in, his shirt open at the neck although it was the end of December, and his flannels looking somewhat crumpled.

Fergus laughed lustily. ‘Come off it, Jack. Romeo stuck to one girl, didn’t he? I’ve had dozens.’

‘What’s her name, the one you were out with tonight?’ Jack winked to Renee, to show her he was teasing Fergus this time.

‘Eleanor. She works in Boots the chemist, and she’s a real corker. Lovely fair, curly hair, and not one of your suicide blondes, either, like some of them.’

Renee, whose own fair hair had straightened out a bit since she’d pestered her mother to have it cut, felt that she’d hate the name Eleanor for the rest of her life, but she was curious enough to ask, ‘Suicide blondes? What’s that?’

‘Dyed by their own hands.’ Fergus giggled, then had to explain. ‘Dyed, as in bleached, died, as in snuffed it. See?’

‘Well, folks, I’m off.’ Jack stood up. ‘Work the morrow, again. I hate Mondays. Goodnight, Renee.’

She rose to her feet hastily when he went out. ‘I’d better go, too, or Mum’ll be wondering what I’m doing.’ She had dropped the childish ‘Mummy’ since Fergus had come to lodge with them.

Giving her his mysterious look, he murmured, ‘I know what I’d like you to be doing.’

With no experience of suggestive remarks, she asked, naively, ‘What’s that?’

‘Giving me a cuddle.’ He gave her a sidelong glance as he placed his arm round her. ‘You’re getting to be a real beauty, Renee, but I wish you were a few years older.’

The butterflies in her stomach almost prevented her from breathing. Was she about to receive her first kiss?

Turning her towards him, Fergus looked deeply into her eyes. ‘Grow up quickly for me. I want to be your very first.’ He brushed her lips gently with his, leaving her trembling when he went out, and wishing the next few years of her life away. She was disappointed that he hadn’t kissed her properly, like in the love stories she sometimes read now, when she imagined that Fergus was the hero and she was the heroine, but that near-kiss would do to be going on with. A promise of things to come? What had he meant when he said he wanted to be her very first, though? First what? First boyfriend? First man to kiss her? Either way, it would be Fergus, whatever happened.

George Gordon set off on Wednesday morning, with two boxes and a suitcase in the boot of the old Erskine, so Anne took the chance to spring-clean his room. She washed his blankets and bedspread, then the curtains, and even gave the jute carpet a shampoo with yellow soap after she brushed down the ceiling and walls. It was hard work, but she liked things to be clean.

Fergus made no further advances to Renee, nor any attempts to get her alone, and a sick jealousy took possession of her each time he went out, presumably with his Eleanor, the corker who worked in Boots, and who didn’t bleach her hair or snuff it, whatever that was, and so wasn’t one of those who were suicide blondes. She couldn’t divulge her feelings to anyone – not to Jack, who would probably laugh at her, and certainly not to her mother, who would be horrified – but her dreams were always of Fergus, his dark eyes full of love as he looked at her, and his firm lips pressed passionately against hers.

George Gordon did not return on Sunday, and, by the middle of the week, with no word from him, Anne began to fear that something had happened to him.

On Thursday morning, she asked Renee to go into his boxroom with her. She hadn’t liked to go in there before, as it was where he kept all his personal belongings, but an uneasy suspicion was forming in her mind.

Renee was amazed when they opened the door. ‘He’s taken all his things! There’s just a few books left, and odd bits of wirelesses and old rubbish.’

‘I’m not really surprised,’ Anne said sadly. ‘I was beginning to think he’d done a bunk.’

‘He wouldn’t go off like that without telling you, Mum.’

‘Oh, yes, he would, if it suited him.’

‘Look at this.’ Renee pounced on a small bottle. ‘This is black hair dye. Did you know he dyed his hair?’

‘He only did his sideburns.’ Anne shrugged her shoulders. Her brother-in-law’s hair was the least of her worries.

‘What’s sideburns?’ Even at a time like this, when she knew that her mother was upset, the girl had to ask about anything which puzzled her.

Anne clicked her tongue, but pointed to the front of her ear. ‘It’s the bits down here. For goodness sake, put that bottle down. We’d better go downstairs, for there’s nothing we can do about this.’ She closed the boxroom door, and leaned against the bedroom wall, breathing deeply for a minute, before she walked to the top of the stairs.

Renee followed her mother, noticing that Anne’s hands were shaking as she laid them on the bannister. What on earth was going to happen now?

‘George has taken all his stuff away, except for a few odds and ends,’ Anne said quietly, when she went into the diningroom, where Jack and Fergus were having breakfast. ‘He’d never meant to come back. I bet he’s away with his fancy woman – that had been the decision he said he’d to make.’

‘Good for him,’ Fergus said, grinning. ‘That’s the way to do it. Take the bull by the horns, and to hell with everything.’ Renee didn’t know whether to be happy for her uncle or not, but she felt obliged to set her mother straight about one thing. ‘It wasn’t the fancy woman, Mum. Uncle George told me he’d been finished with her before Auntie Jenny ever found out, but she wouldn’t believe him. He said he’d met a very respectable lady who wanted marriage or nothing, so she wouldn’t have gone away with him – not if she knew he was a married man.’

Fergus burst out laughing. ‘Maybe he didn’t tell her. This gets better all the time. Marriage or nothing, that’s great.’ Anne drew her brows down angrily. ‘He could at least have told me what he was going to do. I wouldn’t have told Jenny, and now I don’t know whether to let his room or not. I’d a feeling something wasn’t quite right, and I can’t afford to hang on much longer.’

Silent until then, Jack asked, gently, ‘What about the shop, Mrs Gordon? Will the man who was left in charge manage to run it on his own?’

‘Oh, my God!’ Anne moaned, the anger in her face replaced now by anxiety. ‘I’d forgotten about the shop. No, Frank Leslie won’t manage to run it on his own. You see, somebody’s got to go to the meat market every morning, and it’s all got to be cut up, and there’s mince to be made, and sausages and potted head . . . No, no, he couldn’t. What am I going to do?’

Jack stood up. ‘You’d better speak to this Frank, I think. He might be able to suggest something, and, anyway, you’d find out exactly what’s what. Maybe George told him what he was going away for. I’m sorry, but I’ll have to go now, or I’ll be late. Are you ready, Fergus?’

‘Sure thing.’ He pushed back his chair. ‘Don’t worry, Anne, it’ll all come right in the wash.’

Renee worried about her mother while she was getting ready for school, until it came to her that Fergus had said

‘Anne’, not Mrs Gordon as he usually did. Why the change? She couldn’t fathom it out, and the seed of jealousy was sown.

After her daughter went out, Anne washed and dressed, to go to the shop to talk to Frank, as Jack had suggested. She was lifting her coat out of the old wardrobe in the loft, when the doorbell rang, so she ran downstairs, wondering who could be calling at that time of day.

It was Frank Leslie, in the shop van. ‘Can I speak to you, Mrs Gordon?’ His voice was urgent.

‘I was just coming to see you.’ Anne held the door open for him. ‘I think George has left for good.’

‘No ‘‘think’’ about it. He’s left for good, right enough.’ The young man sat down wearily, though his hands were moving restlessly. ‘And he’s left a right mess behind him.’

‘A mess? What d’you mean?’ Her abrupt words conveyed tense alarm.

‘He hasn’t paid the meat market for weeks, and he’s away with all the cash. He must have planned it all out.’

‘What?’ Anne collapsed into the other armchair.

‘The man he took on to help me the time he was away was only there till Saturday night, so I’ve had to close the shop every day this week to go for the meat.’

‘Yes?’ She had difficulty in saying even the one word.

‘Well, I thought they were a bit funny the first three days, but this morning the manager told me we wouldn’t get any more till we paid the hundred and fifty pounds that’s owing. And we can’t pay, Mrs Gordon, for there’s no money.’

‘But, surely, if they gave us time, we could . . .’

‘We couldn’t, there’s nothing to sell.’ Frank stared at Anne as if he hoped she could perform a miracle.

‘Oh, my God! I never thought things would be as bad as this.’ The tears were not far off, and she swallowed repeatedly, so as not to break down in front of him.

‘I’d have worked for you for nothing, Mrs Gordon, till the shop got back on its feet, but if we can’t get meat, we’re absolutely sunk.’ They looked at each other helplessly, each trying to find strength from the other. It might as well have been a thousand pounds owing, for all the chance they could see of settling the debt George Gordon had amassed.

Anne was first to break the silence. ‘What can we do, then? How can we pay off all that?’

Frank straightened up. ‘There’s only one thing we can do, and that’s to sell up everything – the van, the machines, the message bike, the till, everything. Even at that, it’ll be touch and go if we get enough, and it’s the end of the shop.’

After sitting deep in thought for a few minutes, unwilling to take this drastic step, Anne nodded slowly. ‘It’ll be the end, but it’s the only thing we can do. Where can we sell them, though, and how do we start?’ The shock of learning the predicament was bad enough, but disposing of the shop which Jim’s father had built up made her feel very guilty. The young man knew exactly how she was feeling, so he said, gently, ‘I haven’t much idea about it myself, but I’ll put word round some of the other butchers for a start, and they’ll maybe buy some of the stuff. It’s not your fault, Mrs Gordon, and nobody can blame you for it.’

‘I suppose not, and thank you for trying to help. I wouldn’t have known where to begin.’

‘That’s OK. I’ll let you know what happens, but I’d better get back to the shop now and sell off what little there is left. Then I’ll make up a list of all the equipment.’

When Renee came home from school at lunchtime, she found her mother, with red-rimmed eyes, setting the table.

‘What’s wrong, Mum?’ she asked, fearfully. ‘Has something happened to Uncle George?’

‘Nothing’ll ever happen to your Uncle George,’ Anne said, sharply. ‘He’s got the luck of the devil himself. He’s cleared off with all the money from the shop, and owing the meat market a hundred and fifty pounds.’

‘What’ll they do about that?’

‘They expect the shop to pay, but there’s no money, and no meat. Frank Leslie was here this morning to tell me about it, and we’re going to have to sell up everything and give up the shop. It’s all that’s left to do.’

Renee was outraged. ‘I never thought Uncle George would do a thing like that. He was always so thoughtful and kind.’

Anne pursed her lips briefly, then shook her head. ‘I suppose we can hardly blame him, really. His life hasn’t been up to much for a long time, but he hasn’t thought about anybody but himself now. He’ll likely not even support Jenny and Peggy, and, with the shop finished, there’ll be nothing for them, or for us, either. I don’t know how I’m going to manage.’