Orphan of Angel Street (48 page)

‘I’m just off to work,’ she said curtly, picking up her cardigan.

‘I’ll walk with you then.’ Dorothy’s tone brooked no argument.

‘I’m in good time,’ Mercy said. ‘Let’s go round Camp Hill way.’

She didn’t speak as they passed through the streets of St Joseph’s parish, wouldn’t answer Dorothy’s agitated questions until they reached the bustling thoroughfare at Camp Hill. Mercy was almost choked with nerves. She had to tell Dorothy, ’course she did. But it was the hardest thing yet. Dorothy had known her all these years, had tried to help her live a good life. She would expect better of her.

‘I didn’t think I’d see you,’ she said lamely.

‘And why not, pray?’

Mercy shrugged. Angel Street felt like a completely different existence that she’d slunk back into to hide, expecting everyone to just leave her alone to get on with it. She wanted to be left alone, to forget she’d ever had any hopes.

‘What’s going on, Mercy?’

They stopped by an ornate street lamp across the road from the Ship Hotel. There were trams passing, bicycles, people bustling along. The bell of Holy Trinity struck one.

Mercy folded her arms tight, looked into Dorothy’s eyes and told her. She expected disgust, scorn and anger. Instead, Dorothy’s face lost all its colour and she had to lean against the lamp-post for support.

‘Oh Mercy. Oh my Lord, you mean he . . .? Of course you couldn’t tell Mrs Adair why you were going! Oh, Lord above.’ She put her hand over her eyes. ‘I knew summat terrible must’ve happened.’ She turned, face hard for a moment. ‘Tell me you didn’t encourage ’im.’

‘On my life.’ Mercy’s lower lip was trembling. ‘You’ve got to believe me, Dorothy. I hardly knew what he was doing before it was too late, and I just couldn’t think that he was going to . . . It was all so strange and horrible . . .’

Dorothy breathed in and out deeply, trying to steady herself. Mercy was moved by her emotion. Dorothy really did care about her, almost like family.

‘What’re you going to do, Mercy?’

‘Have the babby. What else?’

‘But there are places – well, like Hanley’s – after, you know . . .’

‘No!’ she shouted, so enraged she didn’t care who heard. She could hear blood throbbing in her ears. Lowering her voice a little she said, ‘Are you saying I should just throw my babby away the way my mother did me? She didn’t care, did she? She just did what suited her. But I’ll never cast my child off!’ She laid a hand on her belly. ‘It’s my babby – the first person I’ve ever had who’s related to me by blood. Blood tells in this world – or it damn well should anyhow. I’ll look after my own, not like some.’

The two women stood glaring at each other for a moment, then Dorothy reached into her pocket.

‘You’re not telling me everything, are you? Mrs Adair said—’

‘You went to see her?’ Mercy was filled with panic. ‘You mustn’t, Dorothy – don’t tell her! She must never know. It’d destroy her and I don’t want him knowing, making any claims, or—’

‘He won’t make claims!’ Dorothy said scornfully. ‘I’d’ve thought you could at least work that one out for yourself. He’d run a hundred mile rather than admit that babby’s his, in his position. But if you was to tell just him, you might get some money out of him.’

Mercy stared back at her as if she were deranged. ‘I don’t want his filthy money! I don’t want anything to do with him!’

‘You might think different when it’s born and going hungry.’

‘Alf and Mabel won’t let us go hungry.’ Mercy pulled herself up straight, making a show of strength. ‘And I’m going to provide for it too. I can survive. I’ve always had to, haven’t I?’

A tram rumbled past on the street beside them. Dorothy pulled Paul’s letters out from her pocket and held them out. Only then did Mercy’s face crumple. Her eyes widened before filling with tears. She covered her face with her hands.

Mercy sat in the ticket booth at the cinema while the first showing was on. She could hear the music from inside. She slit open the envelopes containing Paul’s letters, her hands trembling so much she could barely manage.

The first, two weeks old, contained the usual news from Cambridge. Paul’s father was deteriorating, had had another slight stroke. Paul was caring for him continuously. The sight of his handwriting wrung her heart.

By the second letter he had received her last note, posted on her flight from the Adairs’. Mercy began reading, then looked up, unable for a moment to go on. In the dim light she could just see her pale face reflected in the glass. When she looked down again to read the letter, the pain and bewilderment contained in his few quiet words seemed to burn from the page.

My loved one,

I can feel – I hope – the distress of your last letter to me. I have read it over and over many times, trying to make sense of it. How could you imagine for a second that I could ever forget you? Or perhaps there is another reason, another person in your life, and that is why you want to forget me? What is it, my love? What could have made you write a letter like that all of a sudden, as if I could just stop feeling what I do for you and that everything between us was nothing? If only I could see you, I’m sure we could make ourselves understood so much better.

Until I hear from you again I shan’t be able to believe you meant your letter. Please write and tell me it was a mistake, that the future is not just the bleak nothingness it feels to be now.

Yours ever,

Paul

*

‘She says she’s going to keep the child. Won’t hear of anything else.’

Grace had gone to the window as Dorothy talked, standing in the shadows by the long curtains, looking, but seeing nothing of the street outside.

Dorothy waited, knowing Grace had heard everything she’d said. The carriage clock on the mantelpiece ticked, deafeningly, it seemed. The sound of time passing. Dorothy watched Grace’s profile, her fashionable, jaw-length hair caught neatly behind her left ear. Standing like this she looked quite youthful, still slim, in her white pleated skirt and a soft blue blouse. But as soon as she turned towards Dorothy, every day of her years of suffering showed in her face. It was not the suffering of physical deprivation, of hunger or the grinding lack of money and warmth. But Grace had never known a day in the past twenty years without emotional pain.

‘It’s the worst.’ She spoke barely above a whisper. Her face had suddenly taken on the creased look of an old woman’s. ‘I can’t think of anything – if she dies it could scarcely be worse. To think of her having to endure the pain, the shame and hardship . . .’

‘You did it – you survived it.’ Dorothy wanted to reach out, to give comfort, but Grace was untouchable. ‘She has people round her who are perhaps more forgiving than you did.’

‘I ran away. But I always knew I could go back. He said I could always go back so long as there was no child. I was a coward. But she has so little to go back to – not wealth or comfort as I had.’ After a moment she said in horrified wonder, ‘James Adair . . . are you sure? My memory of him is of a rather kind, stuffy fellow.’

‘I can only go by what she says, dear. But there is someone else – was. In America. But she said she’d had to put him off.’

‘What did she say to you? What are her thoughts?’ Grace stepped forward, desperately. ‘Oh, I feel I know her so well, and yet . . .’

‘She said she’ll never give up the child. Whatever happens she’s sticking with it.’

Grace paced the room, unable to keep still. ‘No one knows better than you what I’ve been through, my dearest Dorothy. You know never a day has gone by without my thinking of her, praying for her . . . But I’ve asked myself over and over again whether I was wrong, whether I should have faced every shame and denial that would have been handed out to me. I could have stayed in that room, with that Mrs Bartlett, while I still had a little money.’ She shuddered. ‘I suppose somehow I should have survived. But Dorothy, I was so young, so very frightened. I felt I’d sunk beneath the level of life itself when I was there, into an appalling hell . . . But Mercy has lived most of her life in such places. I condemned her to that. And she has strength – oh God, that I had had her courage! If they hadn’t made me – if I hadn’t let them make me . . . If he hadn’t gone away – I should never have abandoned my own flesh and blood . . .’

As her distress mounted, Dorothy went to Grace and took her gently in her arms. If only she could take this pain from her! Grace sobbed brokenly against her shoulder.

‘He would’ve been no good for you. Not in the end.’

‘My life has been one long pretence – this parody of a marriage . . .’ She looked up, wet-eyed, into Dorothy’s face. ‘D’you know, before Neville left – in the War – I prayed for him to die?’

‘Yes, well – so did I.’

The two women looked at each other solemnly. Grace suddenly broke away and sat down.

‘I have spent my life safeguarding all the wrong things.’ Dorothy saw in her a moment of the steeliness that reminded her of Mercy. ‘Even now, to protect my sons I am a stranger to my daughter. To protect this facade of a respectable marriage which suits my husband I tolerate him spending more time in common whorehouses than he ever does with his sons.’

She straightened her back, her chin jutting out. ‘Mercy must know who her mother is. I owe her that, and so much more.’

‘What about Neville – if he were to find out?’

‘I think’, Grace said calmly, ‘I shall probably kill him.’

‘Grace!’

‘It’s all right, Dorothy. I don’t think I mean it. I don’t wish to rot away in prison for the rest of my life. All I mean is, I have to be prepared to pay the price, whatever it may be. But now the boys are old enough, they see their father with clear eyes. I’m certain we can trust them to support us.’

‘What’s up with you, wench?’ Neville said when he got home that evening. His voice, as ever, was sneering. ‘Didn’t the wind blow the way you wanted it to today?’

‘I’m quite all right, thank you,’ Grace said mechanically. She knew her eyes still showed signs of tears, and she evaded his brief, insolent glance.

Neville had returned from the War a much leaner man. Over the past year and a half though, he had bloated into middle age, with a complexion ruddy from overindulgence. His cheeks were loose and flushed and merged with his thick chin with scarcely a hint of jawline present. His body was short and stocky and he walked, legs apart, with a swagger. Lately he grew more quickly short of breath. Over the years his catalogue of charming habits about the home had grown in number and intensity: bawling about the place, hawking phlegm in his throat, drinking regularly to excess, cursing, belching and passing wind with orchestral loudness. And despite Grace’s barely concealed revulsion for him, he hadn’t left off his intermittent, gross mauling of her in bed.

She had learned early in this loveless marriage that he could be two different men. Out of the home, or in company, he could be gregarious, charming, humorous. He had a generous side to his character and a loud, infectious laugh. This was how he had appeared to Grace’s father when their marriage was arranged. They had not been married more than a few weeks when, with her, he became moody, foul-mouthed, out of control. Both of them were unhappy. Grace knew that nothing she could do ever seemed to give him satisfaction and never had, since the very earliest days, though she had tried and tried.

That night he flung his hat down in the hall and went, as usual, straight to the whisky decanter. He poured half a tumbler of the burning strong liquid, downing it in gulps. Grace usually avoided him, but tonight she stood at the threshold of the parlour, watching.

‘I don’t know why you’ve bothered to remain in this marriage.’ She spoke with such cold objectivity that he turned, mouth swirling a gulp of whisky, startled to find her observing him. He narrowed his eyes and swallowed.

‘It’s the thing to have a wife. If I have to have one it might just as well be you. Out of my way.’ He pushed past her and stumped heavily up the stairs.

*

‘Boys, I have something important I want to talk to you about.’

She sat on Edward’s bed. He, the younger of the two, was now ten. He sat up, grey eyes fixed solemnly on her face. Robert, twelve, was puppyish and full of often misdirected energy. He hurled himself across from his bed and landed on Edward’s legs.

‘Ouch!’ Edward yelled. ‘Get off, you great lump of a thing!’

‘Boys, please just sit still,’ Grace said, her voice sharp with nerves. ‘I want to tell you something important.’ For a moment she wished that Edward, the one most akin to her, was the older.

Once they were sitting quiet, sensing her seriousness, she told them what she had to say, her tears coming unbidden. She felt she was confessing to them, her own children, laying bare her shame.

‘You see,’ she finished, looking up at them bashfully, ‘perhaps Mummy isn’t quite the person you thought she was.’

‘So—’ – Robert was frowning, attempting to take in the implications of this – ‘you mean we have a sister . . . somewhere?’

‘That’s right. Her name is Mercy.’

‘And she’s much bigger than us and she’s never going to live with us?’

‘Yes, dear, both those things are true too.’

‘Oh,’ Robert said, beginning to lose interest. ‘Well, that’s all right then, I suppose.’

‘Mummy,’ Edward said, ‘can I carry on reading
Treasure Island
now?’

Grace smiled. ‘In a moment. There’s something else, just as important, I need to say to you. I don’t often ask you to keep a secret, though this is a very special secret that I thought you were old enough to know. But this is something I don’t ever want you to breathe a word to Daddy about. Ever. It would make him very, very angry. Can you understand how important that is, my darlings?’

‘Oh yes,’ Edward said dismissively. ‘Daddy never listens to anything we say anyway.’

Grace knew this was true. And even when the boys spoke to their father it was never a relaxed interchange. It was a risk she had taken, but it was unlikely anything would slip out in an unguarded moment of jollity, for such moments did not exist in their household.