Polly's Pride (29 page)

Dusk was starting to fall by the time Eileen turned back into the entry to head for home. She’d walked about longer than she’d meant to, and Terence would moan at having been left with the children. But she’d a nice bit of pork together with some crackling for his dinner, so that should sweeten his temper.

She heard the scrape of a clog iron on stone, but took no notice. And then the unmistakable sound of a man’s breath close to her ear. Eileen jumped as if stung, but even as she half turned to see who it was, she found her face enveloped in an all-pervading darkness. She opened her mouth to scream but it was filled instantly with the soft wool of a shawl, a stifling hand pressed tight against it. making it almost impossible for her to breathe, let alone cry out.

Fear was shooting through her as strong arms dragged her to the ground and she felt the hard ridges of stone cobbles beneath her back. Even when the hand lifted from her mouth it was only to tie the shawl in harsh efficient knots about her neck so that she could do no more than sob, too afraid to call out for fear he might throttle her. Hadn’t she read enough gruesome tales on the bill boards advertising the Illustrated Police Gazette? She could guess only too well what was about to happen, knew she had to stay calm if she was not to inflame the man’s anger still further.

Shrouded by the cloying closeness of the shawl, the claustrophobic darkness stifling her, Eileen felt herself gagging for breath, certain she must die of suffocation any minute. She struggled to form sounds in her throat but it had gone too dry. Even so, screams sounded inside her own head when the weight of him came down hard upon her, robbing her of the last of her breath.

He pinned her to the ground with one hand pressed against her throat while with the other he pushed up her skirt to explore the nakedness of her stomach and buttocks, and private parts. She could do nothing save pray for someone to walk into the entry and rescue her.

No such salvation came.
 

He took her with a terrifying swiftness, scarcely uttering a sound beyond carefully suppressed grunts in the rigours of his climax. It was shocking, excruciatingly painful, but blessedly quick. For an instant her body had been filled with a tearing pain; her nostrils with a cloying, unpleasant odour she couldn’t quite identify. And then he was done with her. She heard him get up, heard a sharp intake of breath and a stifled oath, as if at last he realised what he had done and was expressing regret. But Eileen could only lie where he had thrust her, broken and degraded.

She lay shivering on the freezing stone setts for what seemed like hours but was probably no more than ten minutes before finally convinced that he had gone, and it was safe to move.

Eileen got stiffly to her feet and clung to a back yard wall, shaking uncontrollably in every limb. It took several long minutes to untie the knots about her neck with numbed fingers, and to drag the shawl from her head, by which time her sobs were almost hysterical.

She could feel a wetness trickle down her bare leg, and the smell of him clung to her, a violation in itself. She felt the bile rise in her throat and vomited into the gutter, emptying her stomach, leaving her cold and clammy with sweat.

She knew what must be done. She dare not go home. Terence would smell him upon her and think she was back on the game. Turning on her heel, she headed back the way she had come.
 

At the University Settlement she paid for a bath all to herself. Stripping off the borrowed clothes, Eileen took the carbolic soap and scrubbed herself, inside and out, in a desperate attempt to eradicate all traces of him. It was only when she had carefully dried herself, disposed of the dirty water and stumbled home like an old woman that she felt the tremors slowly subside.

She washed herself again that evening, then sat by the dead remains of her fire, sipping a mug of scalding sweet tea. With the children in bed and Terence seated opposite, she struggled to keep a smile on her face as she listened to him chattering on about his win on the dogs that afternoon. But her mind wasn’t on a word he said.

Little by little the shock began to subside, and she began to count her blessings. He could have done much worse to her, she supposed. Whoever it was hadn’t hit or injured her, nor strangled her with the shawl, though for one frightening moment she had thought that was to be her fate. At least she’d survived.

But who could it have been? And why had he covered her head? Because of his deep anger? She’d felt it simmering in him, in his terrible silence and the harsh way he’d thrust himself into her, like raining blows upon her body.

Or had he been afraid she might recognise him? The most likely candidate was one of her old clients. Did any of them hate her that much, or miss her enough to take it without paying? Eileen let the long-forgotten faces slip through her memory.

The trembling started again at this thought, and beneath her skirt she felt sore and wounded, a warm trickle of blood starting. She wanted only to go somewhere private to nurse her pain in peace.

And then she remembered that she hadn’t looked like herself at all today. She’d deliberately set out to disguise herself as Polly. In which case, that was who he’d thought he was attacking - Polly. She remembered then the sharply indrawn breath, not from guilt at all but from realisation that he’d attacked the wrong woman.

Dear God, if that were the case, and she could find no other convincing reason, then Polly must be the one in danger. And from who else but that young Jack-me-laddo in the reefer jacket? She must be warned, and at the first opportunity, for he could strike again.

Joshua was irritated rather than angry at the mistake he’d made. The fact that he had inflicted punishment upon an innocent victim didn’t trouble him in the slightest. The woman next door was of no account, so what did it signify? She’d no doubt suffered far worse in her former line of business. As for Polly, he was annoyed that she’d given him the slip. Where had she gone? And with whom? And why had that worthless chit been wearing her shawl?

Thought she was a clever minx, did she? He smiled to himself. The Irish woman would have to get up early to beat him. There would be other times, other opportunities. He was willing to wait on events. For the moment, her stubborn defiance was proving to be most entertaining, a real battle of wits. But he’d break her yet, see if he didn’t. He would win this little contest and nothing she could do would stop him.

Eileen became almost addicted to washing. Never had she used so much soap and water in all her life, yet failed utterly to feel clean. It took a great deal of resolve, but the moment she felt the soreness begin to subside, she took the precaution of allowing Terence a taste of long-deprived favours, by way of insurance. They’d always joked that he only had to throw his cap on the bed and she was off. This man, whoever he was, had done much more than toss his cap at her.

She lived in fear through the hot sticky days of an Indian summer that he’d laid more trouble at her door than she could deal with, and when her monthly curse, as she called it, did not arrive on time, the fear intensified with each passing day. By the time the second period had failed to materialise, Eileen admitted the worst.

It was this which finally made up her mind. She’d tried and failed to see Polly on numerous occasions, and dreaded what she had to tell her, for she knew her friend harboured a soft spot for the young merchant seaman. Gathering up her children, Eileen went next door.

Fortunately, for once, Polly was alone. She sat, as so often these days, staring blankly into the empty grate. Eileen would have liked to pick her up and shake her. Instead, the minute she’d prised herself free of clinging children and sent them off in search of adventure under the stairs, she took hold of Polly’s hand and stroked it.

‘I have to talk to you, lass.’

She got no further as the front door banged open whereupon both women saw Benny, face ashen, wriggling like a trapped eel as his earlobe was held in a pincer grip by Joshua. The man looked so huge and powerful in that moment, his presence seeming to fill the suffocatingly small room, just as it dominated Polly’s life.

‘Do you know where I found this rascal? Trying to sneak under the fence into the ground at Manchester North End on Charles Street and watch the match without paying. Which, in my book, is thieving.’

Polly offered an apologetic smile on her son’s behalf. She knew that what Joshua said must be right, yet he really didn’t need to hold Benny’s ear quite so fiercely, or be quite so harsh in his treatment of him. Wasn’t he just a lad? What boy hadn’t tried to sneak into a football match without paying? She reached out her hand. ‘I’ll talk to him, Joshua, get him to understand about right and wrong.’

‘He should understand already, a lad of his age.’

Benny gave a great hiccup. ‘They were playing Glossop. Everyone else were doing it.’

‘And if everyone else walked under a train, would you do that as well?’ Joshua asked, and shook him even more fiercely, making Benny’s teeth rattle.

Polly looked into her son’s pleading gaze and felt the familiar stirring of anger. ‘It’s not uncommon, Joshua,’ she pointed out, battening it down as she fought for calm. ‘It is Saturday, the new season must have started and he does love football.’

‘If you’d waited till three-quarter time, Benny, you could have gone in for nothing, when they opened the big gates.’ Eileen put in.

Toes barely reaching the ground, he was whimpering with pain while manfully refusing to cry. ‘But then we’d ‘ave missed all the goals.’ A reasonable argument which caused a chuckle to escape from Polly’s lips at last. Joshua forestalled any further excuses she might have been about to make for her son by switching his attack to Eileen.

‘When we want your opinion, Mrs Grimshaw, we’ll ask for it.’ His voice was so loud in the small room that Agnes and Rosie ran to their mother in alarm, Meryl stamped her bare feet on the rug and started to scream, and Beryl, who’d been happily tearing up newspapers in the glory hole under the stairs, chose this moment to emerge and investigate the noise. Her mouth, still stuffed with newsprint, opened in a loud wail of sympathy with her twin.

In two swift strides Joshua had reached the child, picked her up and deposited her in her mother’s lap. ‘Take your caterwauling brats home before I . . .’ His face was so close to hers she could actually smell him; an indefinable masculine odour, overlaid with a lingering scent of mothballs.

‘Before you what?’

It was as he dumped Meryl equally unceremoniously into her arms, one hand became inadvertently trapped between the screaming child’s clinging arms and her mother’s neck, that the realisation came to her.
 

That touch, coupled with the smell, lifted the fine hairs at the back of her neck. And from instinct born of long experience, in that moment Eileen’s heart seemed to stop, for she realised that she’d been wrong in her previous assumption. She’d done young Charlie Stockton a grave injustice. It hadn’t been him at all who’d done for her on that terrible night, but Polly’s canting, hypocritical brother-in-law. The very same man who was still holding her friend in thrall.

‘I’m going nowhere,’ Eileen said, holding her twins like a shield to her breast.

Joshua didn’t even deign to reply. He grasped a bunch of her orange hair and dragged her, squealing, to the door. Seconds later she was on the other side of it, and all Eileen could hear then was the sound of Polly’s sobbing.
 

Afterwards, she told herself she’d gladly have broken the door down and gone back inside had she not been encumbered with screaming children. Yet it was with a certain guilty relief that Eileen scurried back to the safety of her own house, slammed shut the door, and for once even welcomed Terence home with more enthusiasm than usual.

Benny stood, stiff-backed, in the front parlour, or what Joshua preferred to call his study, by seven sharp the next morning. He’d wisely judged that the sooner he presented himself the better. And there was always the chance he’d be given breakfast after he’d taken the beating he fully expected to get. That’s if he could manage to eat anything, with his stomach so knotted with fear. The last thing he’d eaten was a potted meat sandwich at dinnertime yesterday. No supper had been forthcoming, and not even Grandma Flo had managed to smuggle him a biscuit.

He’d already seen his sister suffer the penance of learning endless scriptures, and being locked in her room for a day. Now, feeling he was about to go to the scaffold at the very least, Benny prepared for his own execution.

He looked into his Uncle Joshua’s cold eyes and thought Lucy’s description of him as a lizard even more accurate than usual. He looked as if he might flick out a long tongue and gobble Benny up at any minute. His uncle made him think of the terrible things that happened in the Saturday morning serial at the pictures, when crocodiles would come out of the swamp to eat Tarzan, or spikes would appear through the floor of a cage in which he was trapped. Except that Tarzan usually escaped with ease, as all heroes did. Benny wished he could do the same, but didn’t feel in the least bit heroic.

The lecture came, as expected, and Benny patiently endured it. All about honour and duty and obedience, about knowing right from wrong, about smoting motes out of eyes and cutting off limbs that had offended. All of which sounded pretty gruesome to Benny’s way of thinking. But what was to follow proved much worse. Offending his uncle’s high moral code had not been a good idea at all.