Spilt Milk (15 page)

‘You’re a rotten drunk, Roger. Leave her alone.’

‘She’s a tease. A cheap little flirt.’

Roger lunged at Birdie, trying to kiss her. She kicked his shin and tore away from him as Malcolm grabbed his brother’s collar. Malcolm turned to Birdie, apologizing. ‘He’s mad about you. Don’t listen to him. He can’t hold his drink. He’s had a thing for you for years. He’s jealous.’

‘Birdie,’ said Peter. ‘Are you all right? Can I take you home?’

‘Take her home? Yeah, she’ll let you take her home. Like mother, like daughter.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ asked Birdie.

‘Your mother lived with two men, and which one was your father, heh? Some folk have no shame.’

Malcolm groaned. ‘Roger, that’s enough. Why don’t you shut up?’

Birdie felt tears pricking her eyes, her heart thumping.

‘Ask your mother whose brat you are. You know what they say, three’s company, two’s a bore, isn’t it?’

Malcolm grabbed Roger by the arm and began dragging him down the street.

‘Get off me. She’s nothing. Little slut. A tease, that’s what you are.’ Roger looked back over his shoulder, his voice slurring. ‘You ask your mother who your father is. Go on and ask her.’

Birdie, Joan and Peter made a dejected group, walking home. They left Joan at her door, and Birdie decided to cut through the park as a short cut to the pub. There was no point in prolonging the horror of the evening. She just wanted to get home.

Peter took her hand and she felt the warmth of his fingers.

‘Roger’s a fool, you know. That stuff about your mother? Absolute rot, I’m sure. He’s a spiteful drunk. I’ve seen his type before. He has a way of knowing how to get to people, that’s all. It’s a nasty low trick. I’d ignore everything Roger said. And anybody else who comes up with muck like that. Tell them to mind their own business.’

Birdie felt a wave of gratitude towards him. Of course Roger was a liar. A filthy liar. The way he’d gone staggering off, a one-man street brawl, his fists punching the air, had frightened her. She’d be happy if she never saw him again.

‘Are you really all right?’ asked Peter.

‘I’ll live.’

‘You’re beautiful, you know.’

Peter kissed the curve of her neck. An act of such tenderness, it made her feel again the hurt and the wrongness of Roger’s
cruel outburst. She thought of Kay, the auburn-haired singer, the way her silk dress clung to her curves, the slink of her hips as she walked. Birdie was close to tears, but crying wouldn’t do any good. Peter would think she was just a silly child. And she wasn’t. Not tonight.

‘I’m leaving tomorrow,’ whispered Peter. He took off his big wool trench coat and put it around her shoulders, pulling her to him. He kissed her nose and pressed his forehead against hers. ‘I’ll write to you if you let me?’

‘Course you can. If you want to.’

‘I think I might be falling in love with you,’ he said, and kissed her.

When he suggested they sit together by the bandstand, she let him take her hand and lead her there. She barely knew him, but he had told her he loved her. Well, wasn’t that what love was like? Sudden. All those songs that talked of love at first sight. Surely there was some truth in them or they wouldn’t be so popular? And she wanted to be loved. To be soothed after Roger’s ugly words.

‘You’re shivering, Birdie,’ he said as they lay together. ‘Let me warm you.’

The hour was late when she got home. Her clothes were damp and cold from the night air. She crept in through the kitchen and up the wooden back stairs to her bedroom. She realized she didn’t know Peter’s other name. Was he thinking of her? She pulled her blankets closer. She would never see him again. Birdie turned over to sleep, hoping things would be all right. That there would be nothing to regret, nothing to bind them both to this night for ever.

The summer of 1939 turned out to be the hottest in years. Throughout June, Birdie sang in the bar on Friday evenings, the windows open on to the night, sweat running down her back, her fingers slipping on the piano keys. Normally she loved the babble
of gin drinkers in the public bar, their faces leaned towards her, but by the first Friday of July she had other things on her mind. The pub was busier than ever. She was tired all the time at the moment. They had the lot in that night: the dirty fascists, their black shirts always clean as a whistle. Her mother said George should ban them, but George said as long as they didn’t cause trouble he’d serve them. That night Birdie sang for them all, the Reds, the cockneys, the Italians and the French, the gangs of Irish dockers; all the lovely lilting voices around her, gobbledegook and inky-pinky parlez-vous. She sang old songs, numbers from the last war jolly with nostalgia: ‘Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts for Soldiers’, ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’. Uncle George handed her a glass of ginger wine, but she couldn’t face it. Normally it was her favourite tipple.

‘You out of sorts?’ asked George.

‘Bit tired, that’s all. I didn’t sleep well last night. There was a cat fight right outside my window that went on all night. I’ll be fine.’

The wafting smoke of Woodbines made her eyes smart. The smell of slopped beer and the scent of sawdust, as familiar over the years as the smell of her own skin, brought on nausea. Sweat prickled her forehead. Men raised their glasses to her, and women winked and told her to remember them when she was famous. She looked at the clock.

‘You go off now,’ said her mother. ‘And come straight home after.’

‘Thanks, Ma. Wish me luck.’

‘There goes our girl!’ said George over the noise of the bar. ‘Going to be the next Gracie Fields, she is!’

In a dingy basement rehearsal room a group of musicians played, surrounded by stacked chairs and tables. Birdie sang with them. This was her chance. A chance to be a singer and not just a barmaid.

The music was wonderful, springing into life, filling the room.
Piano, drums, a double bass, trumpet and guitar. Birdie sang ‘These Foolish Things’ and then ‘Blue Lullaby’. Afterwards the band played together. They were taken up by the music, their faces sweating, grimacing as though it was an ugly thing they were doing.

She sat and waited. Had they forgotten she was there? The trumpet player came over just as she was nodding off to sleep. He wiped his sweaty face with a towel. Yes, they’d hire her, once they replaced the bass player, who had enlisted in the navy. Did she want to go to a club with them now? Hear some black musicians? No? Well, she should learn a few new songs for next time.

She walked back slowly, letting herself in through the backyard door. The pub was quiet, the lights all off. She slipped into the bar and sat in the dark over the piano, playing chords and humming tunes. She was going to be a singer. Uncle George had wanted her to get a job in a typing pool. He reckoned that was good work for a young woman until she married. But Birdie wanted more. She wanted to be like the auburn-haired Kay Kelly. There was a pleasant calm in the shut-up pub. A dusty silence where slow cigarette smoke still wafted. A peacefulness. As if everything that needed to be said had been said, and all the punters had finally been able to go home to sleep, glad to have got another day over with. A whole new day waiting patiently for them while they slept.

The following week Birdie knew she was in trouble. She hadn’t had an ounce of shut-eye for days, thinking of what hot water she had landed herself in. She was so tired, she thought she might fall asleep standing upright at the bar. She’d dropped two pint glasses that evening, and Ma had already told her to look sharp.

She leaned against the cash register, feeling its cool metal on her hot skin. Her mother swung past, swathed in widow’s black, towards a customer who was leaning over the bar, waving money
at her. A row of hawk-faced men stared across the bar at them. Birdie tried to smile.

‘Ma?’

‘Please, Birdie, I’m busy. Can you tell George he needs to change a beer barrel?’

Uncle George was at the piano, leading a sing-song. He grinned, his flattened boxer’s nose shiny with sweat.

‘There’s my darling girl! Come on and sing us a song, Birdie!’

She shook her head and hoicked a thumb towards the bar, mimed lifting a barrel and went outside. In the backyard the air was heavy with coke fumes and soot, the smell of coffee from the flophouse across the street. She stepped past an old tin bath and a tangled heap of broken chairs. Beer barrels were piled in a corner, and she sat down on one.

She didn’t want to marry Peter, and she was sure he wouldn’t want to marry her. In any case, she’d have to ask Roger where he was, and she was never going to speak to him again. She didn’t even know Peter’s surname. Even if she did want to find him, she doubted she’d be able to.

‘You all right, Birdie?’

She turned to see her mother wedging a beer barrel onto a sack barrow.

Birdie stood up and made her way across the yard. The ground seemed to shift a little. She put a hand out and her mother caught hold of her.

‘Ma, I really need to talk to you.’

Birdie looked into her mother’s grey eyes and thought she saw fear in them. She leaned heavily against her mother, something she had not done since she was a small child. She had been a needy child, she remembered, always shadowing her mother around the pub until she drove her mad. They’d played Grandmother’s Footsteps at school. A child would turn her back and the others creep up on her as quickly as possible. Birdie had always won that game. She played it at home in earnest too,
sidling up close to her mother, who complained she was like a little dog getting under her feet.

Birdie felt hot, terribly hot. Her ears were blocked, her knees weak. Her mother’s face loomed and went.

‘I’m sorry, Ma,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. I think I’m expecting—’

‘Expecting what?’

‘A baby.’

Birdie tried to grab hold of her mother before she fainted. She opened her eyes to find herself in her mother’s lap, on the cobblestones.

‘Who is he?’

Birdie shut her eyes again. There was no point in saying.

Nellie watched her daughter walk away into the pub. She stood outside, breathing slowly. She had never imagined having a child herself, and now that child was going to be a mother. She’d cared for Birdie the best she could, but obviously had done a useless job of it. She supposed she was like Rose. Not properly maternal. Unlike Vivian, who would have been a good mother but had never been lucky.

Nellie remembered Birdie’s birth well. The speed of her labour. How she had looked down and there, between her trembling thighs, seen the baby, slick as a winkle pulled from its shell. There she had lain, neither a truth nor a lie. Nellie’s baby. And again that confusing, vulnerable love had squeezed her heart.

‘Nellie, are you out there?’

George was standing in the doorway, illuminated by the yellow gas lamp.

‘Just coming in,’ she said, and hoped that by morning she would have an idea of what to do about Birdie. She certainly wasn’t going to tell George yet.

Vivian came to the pub because what else could she do? When she got the telegram from Nellie, she had caught the train the same morning, determined to help her sister and niece. And how long had it been since she stood here in this forlorn little street by the railway bridge, looking up at a set of pub doors, summoning the courage to go inside? Over fifteen years, she thought. Yes, it must be.

Nellie had aged a bit but so had she, and yet Vivian felt like they had never been apart. Nellie was just the same woman. Her hair was still long, though she wore it piled on her head now rather than in that tight plait she used to favour. And it was tinged with grey, of course. Didn’t she look like Rose? In fact, it was startling, the resemblance.

Nellie didn’t mention Birdie and ushered her inside, through the pub, into the back rooms. There she offered Vivian a seat on a hard leather couch, explaining that it was new. Bought on hire purchase from one of the modern showrooms that had opened up on the Essex Road. Nellie had seen it advertised in a magazine, and George had got it delivered.

Though she said nothing, Vivian thought the couch she was slipping about on was hideous. An awful modern thing.

‘How are you?’ she asked.

Nellie hugged herself.

‘I’m all right. Or I was until now. You’ll have to see what we’re doing in the pub, Vivie. George has renamed the saloon bar “the refreshments bar”. We’re getting a lot of married couples coming in these days, and they want a bit of class. Some of them want cocktails, would you believe? George says these new housing
estates going up everywhere are bringing in a different kind of customer.’

Vivian knew Nellie was talking too much. Her sister was near to tears. She couldn’t fool her for a minute.

‘Where is she, Nellie?’ she asked.

‘Gone shopping up west with George for the day. I’m so glad you came.’

‘Of course I came. What’s to be done though?’

‘Birdie’s a good girl. I don’t want you to think she isn’t.’

‘Have you spoken to the boy involved? She’ll have to marry him.’

‘She says she met him at a dance and doesn’t know his name.’

‘Oh,’ said Vivian, and lit a cigarette. ‘I see.’

Nellie got up and began to pace. ‘Shall we go out? I’m afraid George will come home and find us here. Whatever happens, he mustn’t know. It would hurt him so badly.’

‘But if she keeps it?’

‘If she keeps it, then we’ll tell him when we need to tell him.’

Nellie took Vivian to walk along the embankment and see the sights across the river. Vivian suggested Birdie stay with her. They could say she was working in her tea room and nobody would be any the wiser. Vivian could help Birdie bring the child up if she chose to keep it. Her house was big, and she still felt a great deal of affection for the girl. There was no shame in Vivian caring for relatives. But for Birdie it would be harder. Her life would be ruined.

‘That’s what scares me,’ said Nellie. She told Vivian how in the pub just the other day she had heard a girl being described as used goods. Nobody wanted that kind of insult levelled at them. ‘Used goods. It made me want to swing for the chap. What a thing to say. I think it’s my fault. I’ve not been a good mother.’

They sat on a bench in silence. Vivian still remembered the time Birdie had lived with her. If she had stayed, if the girl had grown up in her care, perhaps this would not have happened.

When was it now? My goodness, right back in 1922. She’d come to take the child home with her. She had felt rather heroic, turning up at the public house. Henry had suggested he give her some money for the child’s keep. That had been typical of him, she felt. Turning a family matter into a businesslike arrangement. She didn’t want a penny from him, she’d told him.

Vivian had taken the little girl home. The walk back from the train station was a strong memory. She had finally got what she wanted so badly. A child to care for. Birdie in her pram sat up smiling at passers-by. How marvellous it had been. Up Riverside she’d gone, over the bridge where below the ducks paddled in the clear waters of the river. People said hello. Men lifted their hats to her. Several women made little clucking noises and waggled their fingers at Birdie.

‘A girl, is it? Niece, you say? You’ve got your hands full there,’ they said. ‘She looks like trouble. Oh, what a cheeky face!’

Vivian had never had so many strangers talk to her before. The way other women looked at her as she walked through the town centre – it was as if she had joined a secret club of motherhood. As she neared the guest house, images of the Virgin Mary and her child had circled in her mind. She’d been a vast flowing river of warm motherly love that day. The child in the pram could have floated for ever on the golden currents of her well-being. She had smiled all the way home, thinking of gold-leaf statues of Mary and pink-painted plaster-of-Paris babies. A nursery with a rocking horse. Ribbons and bows.

‘Here we are, my little darling,’ she had said as she bounced the pram up the cobbled street to the guest house. ‘We’re home.’

For two years she had cared for Birdie, and it hadn’t been easy, though she would never tell Nellie that. She would let her sister think
Birdie had been well behaved, because she suspected Nellie had found it difficult to raise the child afterwards. She had been glad to think she struggled with Birdie. It hurt when Nellie took her back. She had wanted Nellie to understand that.

Birdie had been a wild little child when she arrived at the guest house, and she left pretty much the same. She only ever ran. It was as if she did not understand walking. She darted around and was never still except when she slept, which was not very often. Most of the day she threw herself about with a frenzied energy. Vivian was fond of these memories now. What a pleasure to look back upon the daily struggle with a buttonhook to get Birdie’s leggings in place over her black boots while she fidgeted and wriggled. The child had refused to have her copper hair brushed out. Vivian remembered it had taken on a fuzzy look, as if Birdie had a sweep of autumn leaves dancing on her head. She had three words which she liked to shout as she careered around the guest house.
No! Cat! Enough!

When Nellie sent a telegram saying she was coming to get her daughter back, Vivian cut Birdie’s hair. She was frightened Nellie would see it tangled up and think she hadn’t cared for her properly. She and the child had both cried to see those skeins of copper-coloured hair all over the floor.

‘You shouldn’t have cut her hair,’ Nellie said when she saw her daughter. ‘You should have asked me first.’

That had been the beginning of the argument. Vivian said the child’s hair had been knotted and in a dreadful state, and it had been the only solution. In any case, the fashion for little girl’s hair had been to keep it short. Nellie was terribly old-fashioned, always insisting on Birdie having ringlets like they’d had as children.

She had presented Nellie with a brooch. Inside it was a lock of Birdie’s curls. That had silenced her sister.

Nellie sent a telegram a few weeks after she took Birdie back. Birdie was crying for Vivian. What should she do? After a brief moment of triumph –
Yes, the child wants me!
– Vivian had consulted Dr Harding and he said Vivian must not see the child until she had completely forgotten living with her. Otherwise there was a risk of personality disorder in a child split in her love for two mothers.

So that’s what they did. They stopped seeing each other. Over the years Nellie, who was not much of a letter writer, sent photographs of Birdie and then, when she went to school, her school reports. A milk tooth was put in a gold clasp and sent on a necklace, and a small drawing of a black cat done by Birdie was sent in a brown wooden frame.

Vivian looked across the wide River Thames where barges passed by on the lead-coloured water. Down on the mudbanks below them a group of boys was throwing sticks for a dog to retrieve in the water. The dog splashed in and out obligingly, brown as a river rat and not much bigger.

Nellie cleared her throat.

‘I’m sorry I hurt you when I took Birdie back. I know it’s a long time ago now, but I still think about it. I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘I wasn’t upset in the least,’ said Vivian, laughing as if the idea was ridiculous. ‘Not at all. I was glad Henry said his daughter could come home.’

The brown dog the boys were playing with belted along the narrow shoreline and up a set of concrete steps onto the Embankment.

‘Perhaps it’s best if she gives the baby up for adoption,’ said Nellie. ‘I cannot think of what else she could do. How can she keep it? People would be cruel. I will not have anyone looking down on Birdie.’

Vivian watched the dog disappear along the path, its tail wagging as it rounded the corner and was gone.

‘The child too. It would be an unlucky creature before it even took its first breath. We must think of the child.’

‘There’s a foundling hospital near the pub. They call it something else these days. An institution of some sort. I see girls taking their babies in there, and each time it makes my heart go cold. People look at those girls like they’re bad all the way through. I’ve seen a group of women spit at a young girl coming
out of that place. I don’t want anyone ever treating Birdie like that.’

Nobody must hurt Birdie, agreed Vivian. The child could be adopted. Birdie would be able to make a good marriage afterwards.

‘I could talk to Dr Harding and see if he can help.’

The sisters linked arms, and for the first time in too long the years fell away. They both loved Birdie. They hugged and cried and were twins again, the sisters who lived by the river and who spoke another language nobody else could understand. They thought the same thoughts, their eyes filled with the same salty tears.
There’s no choice for Birdie
, their hearts said
. No choice but to give up the child.