The Shop Girls of Chapel Street (36 page)

‘And what about Stan?' Muriel asked. ‘I can't imagine him champing at the bit to track down a man who left him and his mother high and dry.'

‘He wasn't keen at first but he says he'll do it for my sake.'

Violet was anxious to leave. With a hurried goodbye, she stepped out of the shop and turned left onto Brewery Road. From there she wove through the back streets onto Canal Road, hurrying to reach Stan's lodgings by half past, as arranged.

The main road was busy as always with trams, cars, bicycles and buses, and the roar and clatter from Kingsley's Mill in full swing made her press on even more quickly. Then came the Victory, its doors closed, with a caretaker mopping the steps, next to Barlow's, where the familiar maroon Daimler was parked at the kerb.

Violet's heart lurched at the unlucky coincidence. She made a snap decision to cross the road to escape notice but hadn't found a gap in the traffic before the passenger door opened and Alice Barlow stepped out and ran towards her.

‘You again!' Mrs Barlow took hold of Violet by the wrist and pulled her away from the kerb. ‘I might have known.'

Held in a tight grip, Violet tried to wrench herself free. ‘Let go of me,' she pleaded.

‘I
knew
he was up to something. He was in a hurry to leave the house without me and now I see why. But I wasn't having it.'

‘Mrs Barlow, I've no idea what you're talking about.' Violet wrenched free and rubbed the skin on her wrist. Close up, she saw that Alice Barlow's eyes were red and puffy and that she was without makeup.

‘Not so fast. I know your game.'

‘Please – I'm not playing any games. I've arranged to meet someone.'

‘Yes, and don't I know who!' There was wild triumph in Alice Barlow's expression. ‘Caught red-handed – you and my husband. Why else would you come trotting down here first thing in the morning? He's cowering in there now, hoping you'd have the gumption to make yourself scarce as soon as you spotted me. But I was too quick for you both!'

Shamed by the tawdriness of the situation, Violet let out a groan. ‘Once and for all, Mrs Barlow, I've never gone near your husband of my own free will. He's been in the wrong from start to finish and if you must know, after that time at Ash Tree House he's lucky that I didn't go to the police.'

Violet's retaliation sent Alice Barlow into an even greater frenzy. ‘You think you're special,' she screeched. ‘You suppose you're so good-looking that no man can resist you; well, let me tell you – you're just the latest in a long line.'

‘I am not in anyone's line,' Violet insisted, trying both to keep her dignity and to push her adversary out of the way but finding that she was trapped in the shop doorway.

‘The latest and the last,' Alice Barlow vowed. ‘I've told Colin it has to stop. No more cheap flings. Do you know his reply? He said that if I knew what was good for me I would keep quiet and count myself lucky. Lucky!'

‘I'm sorry, this is nothing to do with me.' Summoning her strength, Violet succeeded in pushing free, just as the door behind her opened and Colin Barlow emerged.

His wife flew at him. She barged past Violet and pummelled his chest, letting out infuriated grunts while he let the ineffectual punches rain down.

‘You see what I have to put up with,' he said to Violet, eyebrows raised and with a smile hovering on his lips.

His hateful expression turned Violet's stomach. Instead of walking away as she should have done, she challenged him. ‘You ought to be ashamed. Look what you're doing to her. Your lies are making her think things that aren't true.'

‘Goodness gracious.' Undaunted, Barlow thrust Alice to one side and stepped down onto the pavement. ‘Between the two of you, you're making quite a scene.'

Anger fired Violet up and she decided that she would continue to stand up to him, not let him win. ‘You enjoy making women miserable but in the end it's you who will suffer. People watch you. They know what you get up to.'

‘I couldn't care less,' he laughed, taking his wife by the wrists and shoving her across the pavement towards the car. He thrust her inside and slammed the door. ‘She knows she'll end up back where I found her if she's not careful.'

The effort had made him red in the face. ‘As for you, Violet – who really listens to what you say? You're a grocer's girl with ideas above your station. A queen for the day, maybe. But in truth no one takes any notice of you.'

‘It's not true. You'll see!' Anger against him choked her and she lost the ability to say more, but still she wouldn't back down.

‘See what?' Turning the key in the lock, Barlow trapped Alice inside the car. ‘Here I am, dining out with the Kingsleys as usual, driving my car and counting up my takings. There you are – a nobody with no one.'

‘That's not true!' she declared.
I am someone in my own right. I have Eddie and Stan, Ida and Muriel to back me up.
‘I'd rather be me than you any day of the week.'

Alice Barlow hammered her fist against the car window, mouthing desperate words that couldn't be heard.

‘And that's why you are where you are in life, and I am where I am.' Case proven. Barlow turned away from Violet to find his dark-haired assistant standing in the doorway, her expression wary. ‘Take no notice, Glenda,' he instructed, deliberately and brazenly brushing against her as he strode past. ‘Miaow – they were clawing each other's eyes out, the pair of them.'

The dispenser frowned at Violet and closed the door. Alice Barlow sobbed and subsided into the passenger seat. In silent anguish, Violet walked on.

Sitting on the train to Welby with Stan and with the blue velvet box in her handbag, Violet forced herself to concentrate on the task in hand. Swaying to the steady rhythm of steel wheels clicking over wooden sleepers, she looked out of the window at the weed-strewn banks, at fields opening up ahead of them, with three enormous, newly built cooling towers on the horizon billowing clouds of steam into the dismal sky.

‘Here comes the rain and we didn't bring a brolly, worse luck,' Stan said as the first spots streaked the window panes. He was dressed for work at the baths in his old jacket and cap, having managed to swap shifts at the last minute with another lifeguard. That gave him three hours flat to hop on the train with Violet, find the address on Albert Road that Donald Wheeler had written down and make their next move in Violet's mission to find their father. Then back on the train in time to man the afternoon session at the baths.

Violet continued to stare out at the gloomy scene until a tunnel cut off her view. As the carriage filled with the acrid smell of smoke, she turned gratefully to Stan. ‘I'm glad you're with me.'

‘Anything for you, Violet.' Beneath the usual bravado, he was sincere. Yes, things had turned on their heads and it had taken a lot of getting used to, to all of a sudden regard Violet as his little sister. But Stan had risen to the occasion and drawn a line under past flirtations and flattery. ‘You've been through a lot lately. This is the least I can do.' That in a nutshell was why he was here on the train to Welby with Violet, doing something that he'd rather not do.

‘Thank you.' She smiled at him. ‘All I want to do is find our father and hear his side of things. Then I'll be satisfied. That's all right, isn't it?'

‘Easier said than done,' he warned. The rain came down hard now, running in rivulets across the glass and distorting the maze of grey terraced streets that came into view at the end of the tunnel.
The man's a coward. His whole life is a lie.
Stan kept these thoughts to himself as the train ran clickety-click along the rails.

‘I wonder how he'll behave.' Violet imagined the moment when the three of them came face to face and she showed Douglas Tankard the gold bracelet. It would be a shock at first, but after that there would be facts to be filled in, new pieces of the jigsaw to slot into place. Then, who knew what would happen? Her heart raced at future possibilities.

‘Here we are,' Stan said as the train slowed down under a vast canopy of glass and ironwork. The brakes squealed and steam hissed and obscured the platform as they jerked to a halt.

They stood up and filed out of the carriage. ‘Lead on, Macduff,' Violet said as bravely as she could, though the huge station and busy platforms unnerved her so much that she didn't take much in as they emerged onto a wide square with a soot-stained statue of Queen Victoria on a high plinth in the middle and with roads heading off in all directions.

Stan hurried her across the square onto Wellington Street, across wide Gladstone Street onto the road they were seeking, which was narrower and less busy than the main thoroughfare behind them. ‘Mind the puddles,' he warned as they crossed the road.

And mind the trams and buses, the delivery boys on bicycles and the Model T Fords and Morris Oxfords. Concentrating on not getting run over helped Violet to overcome her nerves at the prospect of what they would find on Albert Road. It began with three-storey detached buildings, housing solicitors and city offices for the county's wool merchants, manufacturers of steel and importers of sugar and tea. As it dipped steeply towards the canal, the buildings grew less grand – an ironmonger's and a greengrocer's, a pawnbroker's displaying gold jewellery in its small window. Across the street from this row was an old chapel, squashed between a corn merchant's and a low, plain-fronted building with its name carved in stone above the door.

‘Brace yourself – this is it,' Stan told Violet, pointing it out.

She studied the worn stonework and unadorned frontage of Wesley House. It had two storeys, a wide door with plain pillars supporting a triangular pediment and four tall windows to either side. From this distance there seemed to be no movement inside the building.

‘What is it – a kind of hostel?' she asked, hanging back with a disconcerted frown.

‘That's what it looks like,' Stan confirmed. ‘It's run by Methodists, to judge by the name of Wesley over the door.'

‘This isn't what I expected.'

‘Nor me. A disease-ridden, rat-infested cellar – that would've been more like it.' And more what Tankard deserved, his tone suggested.

‘We were wrong,' she pointed out. ‘Well, at least this is better than we thought.' She glanced at a disgruntled Stan. ‘What's wrong, are you having second thoughts?'

‘No, I said I'd come with you, didn't I? Let's go.'

Soaked through from the rain and wondering what Uncle Donald would have made of Douglas Tankard being reliant on the charity of Methodists of all people, Violet gathered her courage and crossed the street. She pulled at the old-fashioned bell to the right of the blue door and waited. After a long time the handle turned and the door was opened by a small, thin man with exceptionally bushy eyebrows and a flattened, crooked nose.

‘Yes?' he enquired in a light voice that was neither hostile nor friendly. He cast an impartial eye over Violet and Stan while he waited for them to state their business.

‘We're looking for Douglas Tankard,' Violet explained, her heart skipping erratically inside her chest. Behind them the rain fell steadily, streaming along gutters and gurgling down a nearby drain.

‘There's no one of that name here,' the doorkeeper replied.

Stan said nothing but was evidently ready to turn away. He wasn't surprised – a man with Tankard's past wouldn't stick to his real name anyway.

‘But we've been given this address,' Violet protested. ‘Wesley House on Albert Road. I'm sure this is the right place.'

Picking up the urgency in her voice, the man cocked his head to one side. ‘We look after twelve men here and I know the names of each and every one. None of them is called Tankard.'

‘You say you look after them?' Stan was quick on the uptake as usual. ‘Why can't they fend for themselves?'

‘Either they're too old to manage,' the man replied in the same impartial tone, ‘or else they've been injured.'

‘Injured – how?' Stan interrupted.

‘At work or in the army. That throws them on the mercy of charities like us. We take them in and provide food and shelter.'

‘Do you have anyone called Douglas staying here?' Violet asked. Frustrated by the apparent dead end, she strained to see inside the hostel but could make out only a shadowy entrance area with a low bench set against the far wall. ‘We don't know much about him – what he looks like or what would bring him here – only that he was born in Welby then moved out to Hadley where he went from job to job before he got married then went to fight in France in 1915. We heard recently that he'd moved back here.'

‘I'm sorry – Tankard is not a name I recognize.' Still showing little sign of curiosity, the man, who was wiry and agile-looking, prepared to close the door.

‘I'm his daughter, Violet Wheeler. Stan is his son,' Violet blurted out.

Stan cleared his throat and took a step backwards. Trust Violet to get straight to the point.

The man blinked and cocked his head sharply to the other side, as if dodging an uppercut. ‘I'm Jack Towers, the superintendent here. We do have a resident called Douglas – a man in his fifties who has been living with us since 1926,' he admitted. ‘There are things in common with the person you describe. We know him as Douglas Thornton, though, not Tankard. Please wait.' Leaving the door ajar, he disappeared from view.

‘It's him – I'm certain it is,' Violet whispered to Stan, her eyes alive with hope.

‘Steady on,' came the reply. ‘We don't know anything yet.'

‘It
is
him.' A man who had chosen to live incognito, injured either at work or in the army, living here for the past eight years. She prepared herself for the moment she'd envisaged in her dreams. An exchange of information followed by an embrace. A doorway into a happier future.