The Four Streets (9 page)

And this she did from the very same place, on every night Bernadette went out. Alice lived her life through a pane of glass and in secrecy.

One evening, just as she knew Bernadette was about to leave work to meet her mystery man at the gates, Alice sent her off on an errand whilst she herself slipped outside, under the pretence of dropping a note to the gatekeeper. She wanted to see his face, to look at Bernadette’s man close up. She wanted to hear his voice and get close enough to smell him.

As she crossed the yard, with her keys jangling against her long black skirt, she tried not to stare, but it was impossible. She suddenly felt stupid in her housekeeper’s long apron. Bernadette’s beau was the most beautiful man she had ever seen.

He obviously felt her eyes on his face because he turned, delighted, and chuckled, raising his cap in polite, almost extravagant acknowledgment, and shouted, ‘Top of the evening to you!’ as she walked past. It was the nicest, warmest smile she had ever received from anyone.

She noticed his hair was almost jet black, curly and slightly too long. Alice felt as though she had had an electric shock.

‘Good evening,’ she managed to reply primly, but she felt as though she was trying to talk with a mouth stuffed full of knitting.

He was wearing a long dark overcoat and a sombre checked scarf, but she could see that this made his eyes shine even brighter and show off his face, which was tanned, not pale like her own and that of most of the men who worked at the hotel.

Alice felt her cheeks burn red and her heart beat fast. The blood rushed to her ears and she couldn’t tell what she was saying to the gatekeeper, who was looking at her oddly. Her heart was pounding and her breath came short from rushing. Her eyes were gleaming at her own audacity. She had done it. She now knew his face. That was all she had wanted. For now.

Every day that Bernadette worked at the hotel, Alice watched her being met and dropped off by her man. She waited, like a voyeur, to see every goodnight kiss at the back gate. She closed her eyes and imagined it was she, not Bernadette, being kissed by the tall handsome Irishman with the gentle smile and laughing eyes who let his hands roam over her buttocks. It was she, not Bernadette, who lifted those hands off and playfully chastised him.

One Saturday morning, there was a knock on Alice’s office door, and Bernadette burst in.

‘Oh, Alice, I have the most fantastic news!’ she announced, bouncing up and down. Bernadette was totally unaware that Alice didn’t like her. It was not something she had ever experienced before and she didn’t recognize hostility.

‘I’m to be married and I would like to give you my week’s notice. I’m to become a lady of leisure,’ she trilled, as she turned round and round on the spot, her arms open wide to include the entire office in her exuberant embrace. ‘Or more likely,’ she enthused, not giving Alice time to answer, ‘a hard-working housewife.’

Her laughter escaped through the open door and bolted off down the staff corridor, where the chambermaids looked up and smiled at each other, already knowing Bernadette’s news.

Alice felt the blood drain from her face. Jerry was about to exit her life. She would no longer be able to see his face every day and imagine he was meeting and courting her, not Bernadette. She nodded in acknowledgment and told Bernadette she would leave a letter in her pigeon hole with her stamp card and a reference for the following Friday. She didn’t wish her well, because she felt no such goodwill. She couldn’t get her out of the office fast enough. Bernadette was so high on her own happiness, she didn’t even notice.

From that Friday onwards, Alice never saw Bernadette again, but she never forgot Jerry. She thought of him every single day. When she slept at night, she dreamt of him. Vivid, detailed, dreams. Once she had seen his face and known his voice, he dominated her waking thoughts and, somewhere in her head, she lived in an imaginary world. One where he was collecting her, waiting for her, kissing her. One in which he was hers and whisking her away to a life in a comfortable house, where she could make a world of her own. A life void of Bernadette.

When years had passed and Alice read the announcement of Bernadette’s death in the
Liverpool Echo
, she was breathless with excitement. All those dreams seemed suddenly within her reach. Jerry was alone.

The bus driver approached Alice for the money for her ticket. ‘Lime Street station,’ she said, as she handed over the money without removing her long gloves, of brown kid leather with six buttons. Alice hadn’t bought them; she might have been the housekeeper, but her wages took into account that she was provided with board and food. She certainly couldn’t afford gloves as fancy as this herself. They had been left behind by a guest, placed in Alice’s lost property box and never claimed.

The bus driver raised his eyebrows. Fingerless knitted mittens were the best he ever saw on a cold day on his bus. Alice saw his look and loved it. Her plan had been developing in her mind by the minute. She wanted Jerry, but not his circumstances. She was not going to live a docker’s life. She wanted better than that. That was what happened to the Irish girls at the hotel. She would have to work on Jerry to leave the four streets and use what little money she had to get them away. Alice had worked amongst guests who were travelling on from the Grand to America. She had overheard their conversations and read the letters and leaflets they had left behind in their hotel bedrooms. Alice was taken with the idea of America. New York sounded like the most amazing place in the world.

In a few short minutes she had transformed an idea into a certainty.

The only dent in her pleasure was the unwelcome news that Jerry had been left with a daughter. The wording in the newspaper announcement had repelled her: ‘A beloved baby daughter left with a broken heart.’ Alice loathed children and in Jerry’s kitchen it had taken every ounce of resolve and determination she had to walk over to the basket and make the ridiculous sounds she had heard other women make when they saw a baby. Seeing Jerry’s obvious love for Nellie roused no answering tenderness in Alice; she was more curious as to why a man would want to hold a baby and not look displeased. She knew this was something that made her different from other people, and she must disguise it.

It was not entirely Alice’s fault that she felt this way. As a child herself, she had been so unloved and neglected that normal emotions were now almost impossible for her. From the age of three, she had known that her parents neither loved nor wanted her. Sitting in the doctor’s surgery, suffering miserably with a nasty case of chickenpox, Alice had looked around at the other children, cuddled on their mothers’ laps, while she shivered on a hard chair by herself. Her mother sat in the chair next to her, staring straight ahead with a rigid back, managing to look at no one, ignoring the reproachful stares of the other women. Alice leant back against the chair, wondering what it would be like to be touched and kissed like the other children. Alice was never touched at all.

Neither of Alice’s parents had wanted children. From the day she was born neither of them took to her. Her conception had been an ‘accident’. One they had learnt from, because they never had sex again. The consequence of sex, Alice, scarred them for the rest of their married life.

Alice’s father was a clerk at a solicitor’s in town. The couple were just about comfortable, one and a little bit above poor. Alice’s mother was a hypochondriac who invented a new illness each week, and her father worked hard to pay the doctor’s bills. He was a suppressed, quiet man who accepted his lot in life, did everything he was instructed to do and never complained. Alice sometimes thought he would like to talk to her, that he wanted to be kind, but that he knew it wouldn’t be approved of. Only one female in the house was allowed any attention from her father and it wasn’t Alice.

As the years passed, Alice became almost invisible. You could walk past her in the street and be totally unaware you had done so, so slight was her presence. Her parents didn’t talk to the neighbours and she had no friends to speak of, because she wasn’t allowed to play with the other kids in the neighbourhood. She spent a great deal of time at her bedroom window, watching as other children wheeled push-bikes in and out of the houses up and down the street, sometimes pointing up to the window and laughing at her if she didn’t move away in time.

‘Oi, Miss Havisham,’ shouted the boy from across the street to her, one afternoon when she had spent a particularly long time at the window, ‘come out and play.’ She ducked and hid behind her curtains and didn’t go back to the window for days.

When she was about seven years old, she saw a small child and her father walking hand in hand past her window. No one had ever held Alice’s hand. She watched intently, unable to look away as the little girl and her father passed by. She stared at their hands, clasped together, at the father striding on ahead laughing, his head bent forward against the wind to prevent his grey trilby hat from blowing away, and the flaps of his long dark grey overcoat kicking out in front as he strode purposefully forwards. Her eyes fixed upon the little girl, giggling, tripping along behind like a balloon bobbing around in the wind, about to break free and take off. She had to resist the urge to run out into the street to follow them and see what they did next.

What is he doing holding onto her hand? she asked herself. She sat for hours, replaying the image over and over in her mind. No matter how long she pondered, it made no sense to her and added to the confusing questions that were growing in her mind about her life.

It wasn’t as though she was entirely short of physical contact. The impaired hearing in her left ear was surely due to the fact that whenever she did something wrong, apparently often, her mother hit her with such force across the side of her head that her ear blew up like a cauliflower for well over a week. During this time she couldn’t eat properly or close her jaw fully until the swelling had subsided.

And that was about it. There was never any talk other than what was essential. No affection. No interest. She could never remember a meal with her parents, although every night it was her job to lay the table and then to clear the dirty dishes away, when her parents signalled to her that they had finished. She ate her bread and dripping each morning in the scullery, alone, whilst her parents sat at the kitchen table. She was never allowed to join them.

‘Don’t make any noise when washing up, Alice,’ her mother would bark, as they left the room. When Alice made a noise, she reminded them she was there. Noise pricked their collective guilty conscience.

One evening when she was fifteen, while she was washing the supper dishes at the kitchen sink, her mother made a rare appearance and picked up a cloth to wipe down the table. Alice knew straight away that something must be wrong and nervously took her hands out of the dishwater.

‘Your father has found you a job,’ her mother said to her, without any preamble or niceties. ‘On Monday you will start work as a chambermaid at the Grand hotel in town. You will live in at the hotel and earn your own keep. You can pack your bag over the weekend.’

With that, she put down the cloth and left the kitchen. Alice stared at her back as her mother walked out of the door.

The following Monday, Alice stood at the staff entrance to the Grand with her small suitcase at her feet, watching her father walk away without a backward glance. In her pocket was a bag of barley sugars – the first, and last, sweets her father had ever bought her, perhaps in response to the unspoken distress in her eyes.

She never saw either of her parents again. Within a year, they were both killed in a tram accident, having never written to her or visited her since the day she left. Alice inherited just enough money to bury them, and their furniture, which the hotel manager kindly allowed her to store in the hotel basement. Alice received the news of their death with composure and dry eyes. She was swamped by a feeling of relief. No one would hit her, ever again. There may have been no money, but she suddenly had possessions and had lost the people who inflicted so much pain upon her. Alice felt rich and, for the first time in her life, moderately content.

However, this contentment was destined not to last.

The bus pulled up outside the gates of St Mary’s and through the window, in the graveyard, Alice saw the freshly dug mound of earth laid over Bernadette’s grave like a quilt. It was covered in home-made wreaths and bunches of pink and white flowers. Alice smiled to herself. My turn now, Bernadette, she thought to herself. My turn.

What happened next was a mystery. There was a wire running along the roof of the bus for people to pull to ring the bell in the driver’s cab, should they want to alight. As the bus pulled away from the church the bell rang, seemingly of its own accord, and the driver slammed his foot on the brake. He thought something must have been very wrong for the bell to ring as he was pulling away. The conductor, standing in the aisle, suddenly lurched forward and his ticket machine slammed into the side of Alice’s head.

‘Bloody hell!’ he shouted as he grabbed the chrome rails on the back of the seat to steady himself. ‘What the flamin’ hell are you doin’?’ he roared at the driver in his cab behind a screen of glass. Turning his attention to Alice, concerned, he enquired, ‘Are you all right, luv?’

Alice was pale and still. She hadn’t even flinched. Turning towards the conductor, she smiled as a trickle of blood ran down the side of her face.

‘I’m very well, thank you,’ she replied as she held her handkerchief to her cheek. ‘Very well indeed.’

‘As long as you are sure,’ said the conductor as he walked away. When he reached the platform at the front of the bus, he turned and noticed Alice look out of the window, talking to herself.

‘Nice try, Bernadette,’ Alice had whispered.

As the bus approached Lime Street, Alice pulled the cord and stood up. She stepped off the bus and swept in through the staff entrance of the Grand. She made her way up to her own room, acknowledging the curtseys and bows of the other staff with a stiff little nod. Entering her bedroom, she shut the door behind her and looked around her at the room she had occupied ever since she had become housekeeper. Although vastly better than the rest of the staff accommodation at the hotel, it still was not much to show for her years of service. A single sterile room at the top of a hotel with an iron bedstead and a sink. She had a little money put by, but not enough to give her any degree of comfort, come the day she had to leave the hotel. Not enough to buy her a house or to pay for a lifetime of rent somewhere respectable. And Alice knew that, once she reached a certain age, the end would come for her at the Grand.