Tangled Threads (17 page)

After a moment’s pause, while Eveleen stood on her toes ready to flee at the sound of her uncle preparing to leave, she heard him speak again. ‘You’re right, Mother.
Eveleen’s twice the character of the lad. She’d’ve made a fine framework knitter.’

‘And,’ Bridget put in slyly, ‘you’d’ve had someone to carry on the family business then, wouldn’t you?’

‘Maybe. Aye, maybe so.’ There was the scrape of a wooden chair on the brick floor and Eveleen moved away but not before she had heard her uncle’s final words. ‘And
don’t think I don’t know about your Sunday afternoons teaching the lass your bobbin lace. But this time I’ll turn a blind eye. At least it’s keeping the Devil from finding
work for her idle hands. She’s better here with you than consorting with the village lads on a Sunday afternoon like her brother.’

Bridget’s shrill laugh followed Eveleen as she scurried away down the path. ‘Oho, you can turn a blind eye, Harry Singleton, when it suits you. When you can see a few more shillings
being earned . . .’

As Eveleen hurried away towards the coal store on the pretext of collecting coal for her grandmother’s fire, she could not help feeling the warm glow of her uncle’s approval, even
though she knew he would never say it to her face.

Perhaps, after all, things weren’t going to be so bad for them here. If only, she thought, I can make Jimmy toe the line.

‘Ugh, what’s this? It’s like eating a jellyfish.’

Jimmy prodded the thick white fleshy substance on his plate, while Eveleen stifled her laughter and kept her own eyes downcast. She knew what Jimmy meant. On their only trip to the seaside years
earlier – a Sunday school outing from Bernby to the east coast – they had found a jellyfish on the beach and prodded it with a stick. Digging her fork into whatever it was on her plate,
Eveleen thought, felt much the same.

‘It’s tripe and onions,’ Rebecca said in a small voice. ‘If you don’t like it, Jimmy, I can get you something else.’

‘You’ll do no such thing, Rebecca. Sit down and eat your tea,’ Harry boomed. ‘Jimmy will eat what’s given him or he’ll go without.’

Jimmy pushed his plate away and muttered, ‘Then I’ll go without.’

‘They’re not used to it, Harry,’ Mary put in tentatively, then turning to Jimmy, pleaded, ‘Please, love, just try a little more.’

But Jimmy was already standing up. ‘Sorry. I’m off out.’ He glanced round the table and grinned. ‘I’ll go and see Jane.’ Jane lived near the village green
with her parents. Her father and brother were both framework knitters in Harry’s workshops.

Jimmy pushed his chair under the table and moved to the door. Taking down his scarf from the peg behind the door he turned back and, as a parting shot, he added, ‘Her mam makes a lovely
stew.’

Eveleen risked a glance at her uncle’s face. It was purple with rage. Instead of shouting after Jimmy, he seemed bereft of speech. Mary was nervous, her knife and fork trembling in her
grasp. But it was the expression on Rebecca’s face that shocked Eveleen the most.

Her dark eyes were huge in her pale face and she was staring at the closed door through which Jimmy had just left. She looked hurt and, yes, Eveleen thought, rejected.

Jimmy had done far more than insult the meal she had prepared. He had wounded the girl herself.

The rest of the meal continued in a stony silence, but Rebecca ate nothing.

The tension between uncle and nephew grew worse over the days that followed.

‘You’ll serve that up to him, Rebecca, each and every meal until he does eat it,’ Harry boomed after Jimmy had left, his bushy eyebrows almost meeting above the bridge of his
nose as he frowned. ‘Do you hear me?’

Rebecca, pale and tearful, said, ‘Yes, Father.’

Eveleen said nothing, but she knew her brother. There was going to be trouble.

The horrified look on Jimmy’s face when the tripe and onions were placed before him the following morning at breakfast would have made Eveleen laugh if the atmosphere in the room had not
been so fraught. Mary glanced from Jimmy to Harry and back again. With trembling fingers, she touched Jimmy’s hand.

‘Please eat it, love. You’ll get used to the taste.’

Jimmy stood up, pushing back his chair in such a swift movement that it toppled backwards and crashed to the floor. ‘I won’t. It’s horrible. I’d sooner starve.’

‘Then as far as I’m concerned,’ Harry boomed, ‘you can.’

The two men glared at each other, while the women looked on helplessly.

Jimmy turned and left the house, slamming the door behind him. Mary began to wail. ‘Eveleen, let’s go home.’

Eveleen put down her spoon and got up from the table. She left the house, but more quietly than her brother, and went in search of him.

He was leaning moodily against the pump and, as she neared him, he repeated his mother’s plea, ‘Let’s get out of here, Evie. Let’s go back home.’

Eveleen stood with her hands on her hips. ‘Look, Jimmy,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s high time you started acting like a man instead of a boy. Start taking a bit of
responsibility, for Heaven’s sake. You’re the man of the family. Why do you leave it all to me?’

‘Because you’re so much better at it than me, Evie.’

‘You mean I’m the bossy one.’

‘No, no, I don’t mean that. I’m being serious. You’re the only one who can look after Mam. I can’t.’

‘But you’re her blue-eyed boy. You can’t do any wrong in her eyes. We both know what’s going to happen now, don’t we? With this tripe and onion nonsense.’

He glanced at her questioningly.

‘You’re going to stick it out and so’s Uncle Harry. Neither of you is going to give way. That meal is going to be served up to you until there’s green mould growing on
it. And then what’s going to happen?’

Jimmy grinned. ‘I’ll die of food poisoning and all the girls will weep at my funeral.’

‘No. Mam is going to be caught in the middle and will be smuggling food to you. Rebecca, too, I shouldn’t wonder.’

Jimmy’s grin widened. ‘She’s all right, is Rebecca.’ Then he appeared to be calculating. ‘How long do you reckon it’ll keep?’

Eveleen shrugged. ‘A day maybe.’

‘Right then. I’ll stick it out today and I’ll eat it tomorrow morning. I’ll make my point and then I’ll let the old bugger think he’s won.’

‘It’s not quite the way I meant, but I suppose it’ll do.’ ‘It’ll have to. ’Cos it’s all you’re getting.’

The cricket season was over, but that did not stop the young men and boys employed in Harry’s workshops from practising in the yard on fine evenings until the deepening
dusk made seeing the ball quite impossible. Then, much to Eveleen’s dismay, she would hear them clattering out of the yard, not to go home, but to the pub the Brown Cow, at the end of Chapel
Row. If they could no longer play cricket, then they could talk about it, and where better than over a pint?

‘You wouldn’t think they’d have a pub at the end of the street where there’s a chapel,’ Eveleen said, ranting herself for once.

‘It was probably there first,’ Mary put in. ‘Besides, there are two chapels further along the road on the opposite side. Don’t you worry about Jimmy. He’ll not go
into a pub. And he’ll be home by ten, just like he’s always been.’

Eveleen wondered if her mother was really as blinkered about her son as she made out. But Mary was sitting placidly by the fire, her bobbin lace on her knee, her head bent over her work. Eveleen
felt a lump in her throat. At any moment Mary might glance up and expect to see Walter sitting on the opposite side of the hearth. The tranquillity would be spoilt. But Mary did not look up.
Eveleen wondered if her mother were deliberately inhabiting an imaginary world of her own, pretending that she was back home beside her own fireside with her husband. Anxious not to break the
spell, if it gave her mother comfort, Eveleen tiptoed out of the house and across the road to the chapel where she had promised to help her cousin with the Wednesday night evening classes for the
Sunday school children.

Later that night when they all went up the stairs to their rooms, Jimmy was still not home.

‘Don’t lock the door, Harry. He’ll be home any minute,’ Mary pleaded, but Harry, frowning and silent, made a great performance of turning the heavy key in the door. For
once, Eveleen was in sympathy with her uncle. If Jimmy couldn’t come home at a decent hour, she thought, then he can sleep in the pigsties.

It was half past one in the morning when she heard the gate into the yard bang and two drunken voices be raised in song and then collapse into silly giggling.

‘Oh no,’ she breathed and quietly slipped out of bed without disturbing Mary. She descended to Rebecca’s room, opening the door as quietly as she could, but the click of the
latch woke the girl.

‘What is it? What’s the matter?’ Rebecca’s fearful voice came out of the darkness.

‘It’s Jimmy. He’s shouting and carrying on outside. If he wakes your dad—’

She didn’t need to say more, for already Rebecca was throwing back the covers and getting out of bed. ‘Oh dear. I’d better come down. I know where Father puts the key.
I’ll let him in.’

‘You stay there. You’ll only be in trouble.’

‘I don’t mind. Not – not if it’s for Jimmy.’

There was silence between them as Eveleen strained through the darkness to see Rebecca’s face. She would have said more, but at that moment there was such a banging and rattling on the
door that both girls scuttled down the stairs as fast as they could.

‘Quick, Rebecca, you find the key while I light a candle. He’ll wake everyone in the row at this rate.’

Rebecca was shivering with cold and fright but laughing nervously at the same time. She could hardly get the key into the lock. ‘Thank goodness Father’s a heavy sleeper.’

‘Even he won’t sleep through this if it goes on,’ Eveleen muttered. ‘Hurry up, do.’

At last the key turned and Rebecca pulled open the door. Jimmy fell against her, almost knocking her over.

‘Oh there you are, pretty Rebecca. See Andrew, Rebecca’s come to let me in. Andrew?’ He raised his voice, but, sensibly, Andrew had gone into his own house next door.

‘Shush,’ Eveleen hissed and grabbed hold of Jimmy by the scruff of his jacket. ‘Come in and just keep the noise down.’

Jimmy swayed and put his finger to his lips, imitating Eveleen. ‘Sh-shush. Quiet as little mi – hic – mice. Sh-shush.’

Between them, the two girls hauled Jimmy into Harry’s chair.

‘You go back to bed, Rebecca. I’ll see to him.’

‘No, no, you go. If your mother wakes up and finds neither of you there, she’ll likely start a commotion that will wake Father.’

‘That’s true, but—’

‘Go on,’ Rebecca urged. ‘I’ll stay with him. No one will miss me and I’m always up first anyway.’

Eveleen glanced doubtfully at the frail girl and then at her brother, his head lolling to one side, a glazed look in his eyes and a stupid grin on his face. ‘Well, if you’re sure . .
.’

‘Of course I am. Go on, before you’re missed.’

Reluctantly Eveleen saw the wisdom of the girl’s suggestion and went back upstairs to bed. Though she slept fitfully, she did not hear Jimmy come to his bed under the eaves nor Rebecca
return to her room.

When Eveleen came down the next morning, there was no sign of Jimmy. Rebecca was bustling between pantry, scullery and kitchen preparing breakfast.

‘Where is he?’ Eveleen asked. ‘I’ll knock their heads together, him and Andrew, when I catch up with them.’

Rebecca smiled, a pink tinge to her cheeks. ‘He’s all right. He – he slept it off on the hearthrug. He’s outside having a wash under the pump.’ Her smile widened.
‘Waking himself up.’

Eveleen glanced out of the window and saw Jimmy with his head under the spout, while a green-faced Andrew Burns pumped the icy-cold water.

‘Serves ’em both right,’ she muttered and then turned to ask, ‘What about you? Did you manage to get some sleep?’

Rebecca, the pink tinge in her face deepening, avoided meeting Eveleen’s frank gaze. ‘Me?’ she said airily. ‘Oh don’t worry about me. I’m fine.’

Eveleen was chafing at what she thought of as idleness.

After a few weeks of living in Flawford, she had learnt to make socks on the Griswold machine in the house. She helped Rebecca with the seaming of the garments knitted in the workshops and, of
course, shared all the household chores. And her grandmother had told her that already she had surpassed her own mother’s skill in making bobbin lace.

‘Mary never got her work as neat and even as that,’ Bridget confided. ‘But don’t you let on.’

Daily now, Eveleen listened to their uncle ranting that Jimmy was hopeless and that he was taking up a knitting frame that could be put to better use. Jimmy had passed his seventeenth birthday
and she, her eighteenth, yet her brother seemed to have gained nothing in the way of common sense or a willingness to apply himself.

‘I’ll run away to sea if you keep on at me, Evie,’ he said morosely when she tried to reason with him.

‘Look, Jimmy, we’re lucky that Mam’s family took us in. And even luckier that Uncle Harry is prepared to teach you a trade. And a good trade at that.’

‘Huh. I don’t see him making a fortune even for all the hours he works. And the other fellers who work here take home a pittance.’

‘And you think you’ll make your fortune at sea, do you?’ she answered sharply. ‘What are you going to be? A pirate?’

Jimmy grinned. ‘Now, there’s an idea.’

She had to laugh in spite of her exasperation with him. ‘Oh you!’ She punched his shoulder playfully, then asked seriously, ‘You wouldn’t really run away and leave us,
would you? We ought to stick together. At least until we can go back home.’

‘And how do you think we’re going to do that when we only make a few miserable pence a week between us?’

‘You’ve got to try harder, Jimmy. Uncle’s fast losing patience with you.’

‘Well, if you think you can do any better on one of those frames, why don’t you have a go. It’s hard work, let me tell you—’

‘Me?’ Eveleen said and then again, suddenly thoughtful, she repeated, ‘Me?’ As Jimmy’s derisory challenge took root, she murmured, ‘Why not me?’