Orphan of Angel Street (18 page)

A light rain was falling and it was so dark they could only just make out each other’s outlines. Tom put his hands on Mercy’s shoulders.

‘You know we’re going to France, don’t you?’

She nodded, then realizing he couldn’t see, whispered, ‘Yes.’ A lump ached in her throat. The War was so strange to her and far away. Now Italy had joined in well. The reality of it came to them in the form of lists. Closely printed newsheet pages of the injured, missing, dead.

‘Poor Frank,’ she said. He had died on the Somme.

For a moment Tom rested his forehead on her shoulder.

Mercy put her arms round Tom and held him close. They stood in silence until Tom said, ‘You mustn’t worry. We’ll be awright, me and Johnny.’

‘Will you go together?’

‘I s’pose so.’

She wanted to believe him, that the two of them would get through. All the life that was in both of them, the life she now held in her arms, it seemed impossible it could ever be wiped out. But the next moment the night air felt colder as Tom said, ‘Whatever happens, Mercy, my love, I’ll always be thinking of you. I’ll always love you.’

They held each other so very tight then, not wanting to let go.

Christmas was over, and a depressing one it had been. Smoke and fog hung over the city streets, there was a permanently damp feel to everything and nearly everyone was coughing. In Angel Street the yards were permanently mired with a slippery mix of filth and water, however hard the women in the courts worked at them with stiff brooms. Each time Elsie laid new white flowers on her little shrine to Frank they soon looked soiled and bedraggled in the dank, sooty air.

It was New Year’s Eve, and Mercy was sitting with Mabel and Susan, listening anxiously to Susan’s laboured breathing. She’d had a nasty attack of bronchitis and was still suffering a hacking cough. Her cheeks were unhealthily flushed and she sat with her head lolling back in the chair by the fire, under a colourful patchwork quilt that she’d stitched herself. It was quiet apart from Susan’s coughing, the shifting of the fire and George grinding his beak against his perch.

‘We’d better get you up to bed,’ Mercy said wearily. She was exhausted herself, and not looking forward to another sleepless night lying beside Susan’s feverish body.

‘Just a bit longer, ‘ Susan said, staring at the flames. She didn’t look round, but Mercy could sense how low she was.

‘What’s up wi’ you?’

Susan turned her head and glanced at Mabel who was asleep at one end of the settle, head resting on one hand and throaty little snores escaping from her mouth. Mabel had gained the weight she’d lost in her absence, her face had lost its look of bitter aggression, and except for some extra lines, she was ripening once more into a quite handsome woman, more at peace with herself now she’d managed to earn some respect from the neighbours and wasn’t at everyone’s throats. All the same, Susan knew there were things Mercy wouldn’t want said in front of her.

‘You had another letter from Tom?’ Susan kept her voice barely above a whisper.

Mercy looked down at her lap. She’d had a letter that morning and knew Susan was perfectly aware of the fact. ‘I have, yes.’ She’d slipped out to read it in the freezing privy, the only place where there was ever any privacy to be had. Tom’s letters were so sweet, gave her news of where he was – not yet in France – and always ended with great affection. But they were not so demonstrative or personal that she couldn’t have shared them with Susan. The fact was – and Mercy was ashamed of this – she just didn’t want to. She wanted something all for herself, something just between her and Tom. She kept the letters in the little chest of drawers in their bedroom with the book and handkerchief she had had from the orphanage. Dorothy had told her how it had been left with her on the steps of Hanley’s. She took it out from time to time, looking at its immaculate embroidery as if it were a puzzle, a key to who she was. She ached to know whose fingers had stitched the mauve letters of her name.

Susan’s expression had turned sulky. ‘You used to tell me everything, Mercy. You’re full of secrets now and it ain’t very kind, being as I’m just stuck ’ere.’

Mercy felt guilty but impatient. ‘I’m not. There’s nothing much to tell. ’E just said they’re doing more training and ’e doesn’t know what’s happening next.’

‘And I s’pose you’ve been grinning away like a Cheshire cat and humming to yourself just because he told you that? D’you think I’m daft or summat? I get more out of ’im—’ – she jerked her head at George who was staring gloomily across the room – than I do out of you these days.’

‘Oh, think what you like.’ Mercy was thoroughly riled by the injustice of this. She stood up. ‘I’m going to bed, so if you want to get up there now’s your chance. No point in staying up, is there? 1917’s not looking to be any different from this year.’

‘I don’t want to go to bed just on your say-so,’ Susan snapped, tearful suddenly. ‘You’re not in charge of everything around ’ere you know.’

‘Susan!’ Mercy was really hurt. ‘That’s not like you!’

Susan burst into tears which quickly broke down into coughs. ‘I feel so down and useless,’ she sobbed once she could speak. ‘You’ve got Tom, and I’ll never ’ave anything like that. And no one’s bringing me any sewing any more and that’s one thing at least I can do . . .’

‘But Dorothy was ’ere only the week before Christmas,’ Mercy protested. Dorothy’s visits had dwindled since Mabel’s return, but she always appeared sometime in a month and usually with clothes for them and a job or two for Susan which she’d collect later.

Susan didn’t answer, just kept crying, weak and rundown from her illness. Mercy knelt in front of her and put her arms round Susan’s waist.

‘Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to tell you. Tom and I are . . . well, we have got sort of fond of each other, but that doesn’t have to make any difference. I’m always going to be ’ere to look after you, you know that.’ She leant down, her hair brushing Susan’s fingers, and looked up into her face. Susan tried to smile.

‘Come on – I’ll take you up.’

Leaving Mabel, she helped Susan, step by step, up to the bedroom, on to the pot and finally into bed as she did every night. When she was ready for bed herself she climbed in, leant over and kissed Susan’s burning cheek before blowing out the candle.

‘Night, night. Happy New Year.’

She pretended to sleep as Susan fidgeted beside her but her mind was wide awake and active. For the first time she was finding all this care for Susan a burden. Mabel was here, she was the one really responsible for Susan yet it was Mercy doing all the work. And Mercy was restless now, increasingly so as each month passed. She wanted something else from life. But what? she asked herself. More experience, excitement? She barely knew what else there was on offer, yet sensed the close restriction of her existence. Going to work, coming home, housework – and now with the War all the extra ‘don’ts’ imposed on them. She wanted someone to say ‘do’ for a change. Do find something more to do with your life. Do get out of this place. Do find out who you really are, where you come from. But all these urgent impulses made her feel guilty too. There was a war on, all these lads getting killed. And how could she ever explain how she felt to Susan?

‘Get out of my bloody way, woman!’

Grace heard Neville’s arrival, as indeed most of the street must have done in the calm of this spring evening, the door slamming thunderously behind him and the howling of her younger son as he roared, ‘And get these brats out of the way as well!’ She heard Edward crying as their nanny hurriedly escorted them upstairs. Grace clenched her hands until the nails dug into her palms. Neville had very little time for his sons, spared them no attention or tenderness.

She stepped out of the front parlour into the hall where he was standing, so swollen up with fury she thought his shirt buttons might fly off. She glanced coolly at him.

‘Damn it – look!’

‘What is it, Neville?’ He was so prone to outbursts of temper that she had learned over the years to remain absolutely calm in the face of it. This was effortless nowadays since her feelings towards her childish boor of a husband had passed through pain and loathing to an icy indifference.

‘Are you blind, or just dim-witted, woman – look!’

In his hand was a large feather, greyish rather than white, but its meaning as it was thrust at him in the street was clear enough.

‘Some damn
woman
—’ he spat out the word as if it in itself was an insult, ‘had the gall to stick it in the front of my coat!’

Grace tried to summon at least a pretence of indignation as Neville hurled the feather down on a polished side table and poured himself a large whiskey. Grace watched him with distaste. Her Temperance upbringing gave her an inbuilt revulsion for his drinking. He took a large mouthful and she saw his florid cheeks suck in and out as he washed it around his mouth.

You are foul, she thought. You disgust me. He was still young – not yet forty – though a little portly, and dressed in the clothes of a much older man: a thick worsted suit with watch-chain and weskit, and a Homburg for outdoors.

‘But where?’ Grace asked.

‘It was in – I don’t know where . . .’ He took another gulp from the glass. The fact that he’d been set upon by the woman – one of those suffragette harridans most likely – as he came out of one of the more notorious brothels on the Warwick Road was hardly something he could tell Grace.

‘It doesn’t matter where, does it? ’Ere I am, working night and day – the factory’s never quiet – keeping most of the British Army’s Motor Transport in supplies, and I get treated like a shirker and a coward.’ He banged the empty glass down on a little rosewood table so hard that Grace jumped.

‘But, Neville, you did say just the other day that shirkers ought to be tracked down and arrested.’

‘Not me though, for heaven’s sake! God knows it’s no good trying to talk to your sort. I’m wasting my time.’

He strode out of the room and went crashing up the stairs.

Grace was left standing alone in the middle of the room. ‘Oh dear, poor, poor you,’ she murmured. The loathing in her eyes and voice was unmistakable.

Two days later he burst into the house again earlier than usual, loud and elated.

‘The Master of the house is home!’ he bawled from the hall. ‘Is no one here to greet him?’

Grace, the nanny, Dorothy and the children dutifully appeared in the hall and stood in a semicircle in front of him. Grace laid her hands on the boys’ shoulders.

‘Well, I’ve done it!’ Neville let out his bellow of a laugh. ‘Come ’ere, boys – your father’s got summat to tell you.’

Robert and Edward stepped uncertainly towards him as Grace gave them a little push.

‘Well.’ Neville squatted down, pulling his sons between his thick thighs. ‘Listen to me. I want to tell you summat.’

The two boys fixed their eyes obediently on his face, Robert with his father’s thickset looks, Edward fair and slender.

‘Your daddy’s going away to be a big, brave soldier.’

Grace gasped, hands going to her cheeks. ‘What? What’re you saying, Neville?’

‘It’s all fixed. Joe Grable can run the firm – he’s too old to enlist and he’s worked there since ’e were a lad. Could run the place in his sleep. And I’m off to the Front, to serve my country.’ He stood up, shoving his sons away as if they were tiresome puppies.

‘But you could get killed, Neville,’ Grace said carefully.

‘But you could get killed, Neville,’ he mocked her in a prattling voice. ‘So the little woman has begun to grasp something about warfare these last two years has she?’ He strode over and caught hold of her roughly under the chin. ‘Concerned for me all of a sudden, are you?’

‘You’re hurting me, Neville.’ She kept her voice even in front of the children, the servants. ‘I’m thinking of our – your boys, our sons. You’re their father.’

‘Oh yes, I’m their father – at least according to you. Well, boys want to grow up with a father they can look up to, and that’s what I’m going to give ’em.’ He released Grace’s chin, jerking her face aside, and as he did so, caught sight of the expression in Dorothy’s eyes as she stood at the foot of the stairs.

‘Don’t look at me like that, woman.’ He looked round at them all with a horrible sneer on his face. ‘Hell, to think I’ve got to leave my lads in the hands of all you namby-pamby, coddling women.’

‘So, my wench, your husband’s off to the Front tomorrow.’

Neville’s body thrust against hers, fleshy and bullying in its force as they lay between crisp linen sheets.

‘Hardly the Front.’ Grace spoke quietly, evenly, though her mind was recoiling with dread. ‘You’ll surely be training for quite some time yet?’ She tried to inch her body surreptitiously away from his, revolted by his hard maleness forcing against her.

‘So come on then—’ Neville pulled himself up so he was leaning half over her, his breath thick with whiskey. ‘Where are the tears, the “Oh Neville, I don’t want you to go?” Some wife you are!’

‘I don’t wish you to go,’ Grace lied, struggling to speak as he was forcing the breath out of her. ‘But you chose to do it, Neville. You didn’t have to, darling.’

‘Darling, eh?’

Suddenly he forced his hand up between her legs, rooting against the folds of her nightshirt. ‘Let’s see how much feeling you’ve got for me, shall we, you prissy, bloodless creature. All these years I’ve spent servicing a dead cow. That’s what it’s like with you – and less rewarding probably. When I want you panting for me you’re there with your eyes shut as if I’m serving you poison, you prim neuter, you.’

Grace let out a moan, automatically squeezing her eyes closed.

‘Look at me!’ He gripped her cheeks between the fingers of one hand, squeezing hard, and Grace couldn’t contain her cry of pain, hands clawing at him to release her.

‘That’s it – if I can’t have you moaning with pleasure you’ll have to moan without it instead!’

Releasing her face, he wrenched up her nightgown and forced her legs apart. He started to force a thick finger up inside her, cursing.