The House by Princes Park (17 page)

But then she wouldn’t have had her girls. They were on the bed, both asleep. She went over and touched Greta’s white cheek. ‘What would I have done without you?’ she whispered. The pale lips were curved in a wistful smile and she was clutching the rag doll she had christened ‘Babs’. She resembled her father, with the same butter-coloured hair, the same blue eyes and long, fair lashes. She had Jacob’s placid temperament.

Poor Jacob! Ruby sighed. He was a nice man who’d been expected to act in a way that was quite beyond him.
Jacob needed peace, quiet, to be left alone. Jacob, the farmhand, would have worked as hard as any man, harder than some.

Ruby made no attempt to touch her other daughter for fear of waking her. At nine months, Heather was a minx, crawling now, into everything. Twice she’d burnt her hand on the iron that had been hidden under the bed to cool. Mother and daughter were very alike. Heather had black hair and almost black eyes. Thin and wiry, very strong, she was almost as tall as Greta who was a year older, often sickly, and still underweight.

She supposed she may as well eat the stew going cold on the table. Stew was easiest to make on the gas ring in the kitchen – she wouldn’t have dreamt of putting anything in the filthy oven. Cooking was difficult since Heather had started crawling. She didn’t know whether to leave the child in the room with everything dangerous out the way, or take her downstairs where there were different hazards, including cockroaches which Heather couldn’t be trusted not to catch and eat.

When, oh, when, would they get away from Foster Court!

It was only in the dead of night that the house was still and silence descended. For this reason, Ruby never minded the occasional times when she woke, able for once to hear the girls’ gentle breathing and Jacob’s soft snores. No babies were crying, no women screaming, doors slamming. No one was fighting. Sometimes, she would lie, quite content, until the wheels of the milk cart rattled along the main road, followed by the clink of bottles. As if this was a signal for the area to come to life, doors would open, voices could be heard, whistling, and the steady beat of booted feet as men marched towards the docks to start their day’s work. At this point, Ruby would wake Jacob and get up
herself and hope to reach the kitchen before anyone else to boil water for tea.

When she woke up that night, she realised something was wrong, something was missing. She remembered Jacob wasn’t home by the time she’d gone to bed. And he still wasn’t there.

She had no idea what time it was. Apart from the children’s breath, the world was soundless. She sat up and lit the candle and for the first time noticed Jacob’s suit wasn’t behind the door on its cardboard hanger. She stayed sitting up, sick with worry and freezing cold, until the milk cart arrived, the dockers had gone to work, when she got dressed, fed the girls, put them in the pram, and pushed it round to the coal yard.

The sky was leaden and the January morning bitterly cold. When she arrived at the yard, a strange young man was loading the cart with sacks. A grey horse, already harnessed, stared moodily at the ground, tossing its head fearfully when it saw her.

‘Where’s Jacob?’ Ruby demanded loudly. Had he lost his job and was too scared to tell her?

‘You’d better give Arthur Cummings a knock. He’ll tell you.’ The young man grinned and nodded towards the small house standing on its own in the corner of the yard. ‘Sounds as if he was a bit of a lad, our Jacob.’

‘How would you know?’ Ruby snapped.

An old man, very bent, with rheumy eyes, answered the door. For some reason, he looked extremely moidered. Ruby didn’t waste time with polite niceties. ‘Where’s Jacob?’

‘Who are you?’

‘His wife.’

‘But I thought...’ He pulled at his snow-white hair and looked even more moidered.

‘Thought what?’

‘Well, his wife’s already here.’

‘I never said I was his wife. I’m his fiancée.’ A girl had come into the hall from the back of the house. She wore a brown fitted coat and a Fair Isle tam-o’-shanter with matching mittens, and would have been exceptionally pretty had her eyes not been so red with weeping. ‘Jake hasn’t got a wife.’

‘Oh, yes he has,’ Ruby said fiercely. ‘Me!’ She pointed to the pram. ‘And these are his children. But where the hell’s their father, that’s what
I’d
like to know. His name’s Jacob, by the way, and you can’t possibly be his fiancée.’

The girl screamed and burst into tears. ‘Jaysus! It’s even worse than I thought. He’s double-crossed me on top of everything else.’

‘Yes, but where
is
he?’ Ruby insisted.

‘He’s joined the Army, girl,’ Arthur Cummings said nervously. ‘The Royal Tank Regiment. He said his wife knew.’

Arthur was a gentle old man, genuinely upset by his exemployee’s disgraceful behaviour as if, somehow, it reflected on him. He made a pot of tea, which, he said, he was as much in need of as his visitors. The pram was parked in the hall and the two women sat at a chenille-covered table in a comfortable back room which looked as if nothing had changed since the last century. A cheerful fire spat and crackled in the black grate.

There seemed little point in blaming each other. Jacob had duped them both. Perhaps it was perverse, but Ruby couldn’t help liking the girl who was clearly heartbroken. She loved him, she sobbed, they were getting married next month. Last night they’d arranged to go window-shopping to look at wedding rings and intended to buy one on Saturday. When he didn’t turn up, she’d been worried.

Ruby glanced at the sixpenny brass ring she’d bought from Woolworth’s. She’d paid for it herself and her finger turned green if she didn’t take it off when she went to bed.
She wasn’t sure how she felt other than totally betrayed. Jacob! Having an affair! She hadn’t thought he had it in him. But adversity had never sat well on Jacob’s shoulders and at that moment her own shoulders felt a fraction lighter, knowing that he had gone out of her life. She might cry, tonight and the next night and a few nights to come, if only because the thing that had started so sweetly had ended on such a sour note. But then it had turned sour a long while ago.

By now, Beth was weeping inconsolably. Ruby reached over and touched her arm. ‘You’ll have to try and forget him,’ she said in the tone of a mother addressing a child. ‘You’re only young. You’ll find someone else.’

‘I’ll never forget him and I don’t want anyone else,’ the girl wept. ‘Me life’s ruined. I can’t go back to work. I’ve told everyone I’m getting married. Some of ‘em have already got me a present. They were coming to St Vincent de Paul’s to watch.’

‘Tell them you’ve called it off,’ Arthur suggested. He was sitting between them like a referee, having taken their predicament to his heart.

‘That’s a good idea,’ Ruby said encouragingly. ‘Say you’ve changed your mind.’

Beth looked at them, her face tragic. ‘I would, I could, except... except, I’m having Jake’s baby. When me dad finds out, he’ll kill me.’

There was a knock on the door. ‘Not another young lady looking for Jacob, I hope,’ Arthur said plaintively when he went to answer it, but it was only his new employee announcing he was on his way.

The knock must have reminded Heather she was being neglected and she set up a plaintive wail.

‘I’ll have to be going,’ Ruby announced. ‘I’ve got things to do, important things, people to see.’

‘But what about me?’ Beth cried.

Ruby frowned. ‘What about you?’

‘You’ve got to help me.’

‘No, I haven’t. I’ve been left in a bigger pickle than you. I’ve got two children to support, rent to pay, a job to do.’

‘But you haven’t got a broken heart, not like me,’ Beth said passionately. ‘You’re not the least upset, I can tell. No wonder he turned to me. You must have been neglecting him something awful. It’s your fault he went away. You drove him to it.’

‘Hold on a minute, girl,’ Mr Cummings interjected. ‘I don’t think you’re being entirely fair.’

‘Nothing
is
fair.’

‘Jacob only left home after he met you,’ Ruby pointed out. ‘It was probably learning about the baby that did it. He wasn’t capable of supporting one family, let alone two.’

‘He supported his mam and little brothers, didn’t he?’

‘Did he thump! He hasn’t seen his mam in years and he was an only child. He could hardly bring himself to support his children. It was the bookie and the beer that took most of Jacob’s money.’

‘Oh!’ Beth started to cry again.

Perhaps that last remark had been unnecessarily brutal. Ruby felt sorry for the girl. She looked too soft-hearted by a mile and was right to claim Jacob had been neglected, but it was his own fault. He’d been treated with the utmost sympathy when they’d first arrived at Foster Court. Another woman wouldn’t have let him lie on that damned bed for more than a couple of days, let alone six months, supporting him, fussing over him. He’d probably still be there, she thought darkly, if Greta hadn’t arrived. He’d treated his daughters with indifference, as if they were nothing to do with him, that somehow Ruby had managed to conceive them on her own.

‘You’re better off without him,’ she said abruptly.

‘How can you possibly say that!’ the girl cried.

‘She’s been married to him for two years,’ Mr Cummings put in. ‘She should know. Meself, I considered him
a nice lad, but he’s gone down in me estimation as from this morning.’

Beth shivered. ‘I’m nearly three months gone. I’ll have to leave home before I start to show. I’d prefer to go sooner rather than later, under me own steam, as it were, because I’ll be chucked out, anyroad, once me dad finds out. At least I’d avoid a good hiding.’

‘That makes sense to me,’ the old man opined, nodding his white head.

‘Yes, but where would I go?’ She spread her hands and shrugged helplessly. ‘Could I stay with you?’ She looked hopefully at Ruby. ‘I’m sorry about what I said before. I didn’t mean it.’

Ruby snorted. ‘Believe me, you wouldn’t want to stay with me. No one in their right mind would want to live in Foster Court. The room was cramped enough with Jacob and he was out most of the time. You and me’d be falling over each other and there isn’t the space for another baby. And what happens when you stop work? Am I supposed to keep you?’

‘I don’t care how squashed it is. I tell you what,’ Beth said eagerly, ‘I’ll do the cleaning in return for me keep. You won’t have to lift a finger.’

‘I can’t exactly afford a housekeeper,’ Ruby said tartly.

‘You can pretend I’m the wife and you’re the husband. I’ll look after the children and make the meals while you go out to work. What sort of work d’you do?’

‘She’s the pawnshop runner,’ Arthur said proudly.

‘I don’t want to be anyone’s husband, thanks all the same,’ Ruby snapped. ‘Not only that, my main aim in life is to get out of Foster Court, not take in a lodger.’ She folded her arms, a sign her mind was made up. In the hall, her younger daughter was screaming the fact she had completely lost patience with being ignored. ‘I’ll have to go before Heather takes the roof off.’

‘I know what you can do,’ Arthur said. ‘Both of you.
You can move in with me. There’s two rooms empty upstairs and a parlour that’s never used. I wouldn’t want paying, like, just the cleaning and cooking done in return.’ He sniffed pathetically. ‘I haven’t had a decent meal since me ould missus passed on. It’d be nice to have company for a change.’ He looked from one to the other with his rheumy eyes. ‘Oh, and I like kiddies,’ he added as if another inducement was needed before they would agree. ‘What do you say?’

‘Yes!’ Beth cried without hesitation.

Ruby contemplated the idea for several seconds. She liked Beth. They had something in common, both having been betrayed by the same man. And she liked Arthur and his comfortable little house. ‘All right,’ she said after a while, ‘Beth can do the cleaning and cooking and look after the children. I’ll pay for the food. It wouldn’t be fair otherwise. But I am
not
,’ she said warningly, ‘under any circumstances, to be regarded as a husband.’

Arthur sighed happily. ‘Then it’s agreed?’

‘Agreed,’ the two women said together, and Ruby thought that Jacob would probably die of shock if he could have seen the way they smiled at each other and shook hands.

Beth’s little boy fought his way into the world six months later on a sultry August night, causing his mother considerable agony and a certain amount of agitation to Arthur Cummings who paced the living room like an expectant father. ‘Is she going to die?’ he asked in a trembling voice when a scream more piercing than the others rent the air.

‘Of course not,’ Ruby snapped. Her own children having arrived without inconveniencing a soul, apart from herself, she had little patience with Beth’s hysterical carryings-on. Mrs Mickelwhite, who’d delivered Greta and Heather, was in the bedroom with her now. Ruby ran upstairs to make sure the latest exhibition hadn’t woken the girls, but they were fast asleep, one at each end of a single bed. She sat there while the screams in the next room rose to a crescendo, then suddenly stopped. A baby yelled lustily. Ruby waited until the gory bits were over and went into the bedroom, where Mrs Mickelwhite was putting a vast, chubby baby in Beth’s arms. The new mother looked exhausted. Bathed in sweat, her gingery hair stood on end.

‘He’s at least ten pounds,’ the midwife said with a satisfied cluck. ‘His poor mother went through hell. What are you going to call him, luv?’

‘Jake.’ Beth stuck out her tongue at Ruby.

‘Bitch!’ Ruby said amiably. The two girls shared a love–hate relationship. Ruby accused Beth of being indolent
and too extravagent, though secretly conceded these trifling faults were more than made up for by her sweet nature and kind heart. In turn, Beth told Ruby she was bossy and mean enough to skin a flint, though was forced to admit she was an incredibly hard worker and extremely caring. They’d argued over calling the baby Jake if it were a boy. Ruby didn’t want to be reminded of Jacob, particularly in human form. Beth wanted reminding all the time. She called herself Beth Veering and had kept his shaving brush – Ruby had been about to throw it out – and it stood, like an ornament, on the dressing table in her room.