Tiger Bay Blues (44 page)

‘If the board meeting I called finishes in time. If not I should make coffee.’

‘And then Edyth and I –’

‘And then Edyth will go home,’ Edyth interrupted Bella.

‘You told Peter that you wouldn’t be back until after dinner. I heard you.’

‘My mother-in-law has a Mothers’ Union tea.’ Edyth dropped two sugar cubes into her cup and stirred it. ‘She asked Peter to call in, but he won’t, because he can’t stand the vice-chairwoman. So he’ll be alone in his study. Judy will be out shopping and Mrs Mack will be taking a couple of hours off, so we’ll have the house to ourselves. It will be a good time to sort out our problems.’

‘And when you have, you’ll come and visit home soon?’ Harry pressed.

Edyth smiled at her brother and sister. ‘I promise.’

‘And if you want me to talk to Peter, I’ll be here all day –’

‘That won’t be necessary, Harry.’

‘But you have the telephone number of the store, just in case.’

‘You two know something, don’t you?’ She looked from Bella to Harry.

‘We don’t
know
anything you don’t, Edie,’ Harry assured her.

‘But you suspect something,’ she persevered.

‘Talk to Peter. Whatever is wrong between you should be discussed by you two and no one else,’ Harry declared. ‘I hope I’m wrong about Peter. But if I’m not, I’ll never forgive myself for not stopping you from marrying him. But you have to hear it from him, Edie. Not me.’

Edyth walked from the city centre to the docks after lunch. It was a cold, dry day and she was enjoying the fresh air and the prospect of a few hours to herself. Her newly cut and permanently waved hair was safely tucked beneath her hat and after spending the morning with Bella and eating lunch with her sister, Toby and Harry, she felt confident enough to tackle Peter and the world. She was also angry with herself for not confronting Peter sooner and for allowing him to move into a separate bedroom.

She tip-toed past the church hall, lest anyone hear her passing and drag her inside. Judging by the noise, the Mothers’ Union tea was in full swing.

She opened the front door of the vicarage and stepped inside. The house was so deathly quiet she could hear Peter’s mother’s clock ticking in the sitting room. She hung her coat and hat on the stand and carried the bag of underclothes and cosmetics she had bought upstairs. She opened her bedroom door and froze. Peter was lying in bed with Constable Jones. They were clinging to one another, kissing the way a man did a woman …

Hating herself for watching, yet unable to move, she continued to stare into the room, at Peter and the young man. The clothes – shirts, trousers and underclothes scattered around the bed …

Peter looked over the young man’s shoulder. He saw her and his eyes widened in horror. ‘Edyth …’

She hung her head and turned her back to him.

Mrs Mack was behind her, blocking her path. An evil smile of pure delight lifted her crabbed features.

‘Now perhaps you can understand why your husband doesn’t want you in his bed, Mrs Slater.’

She dropped her bag and fled down the stairs. She heard Peter cry out her name behind her. She lifted her hat and coat from the rack and wrestled with the lock that refused to open.

She heard Peter shout, ‘That’s the end of your blackmailing, Mrs Mack. Pack your bags and leave.’

Finally she managed to wrench the door open and ran out of the house and across the courtyard. She could hear the slap of Peter’s bare feet chasing after her. His voice, high-pitched and anguished, calling her name.

She didn’t know where she was running to. Harry? Bella? A pain gripped her side. She paused to catch her breath and saw that she was in the street Anna Hughes lived in. A man was walking towards her from the direction of Anna’s house. She recognised him and knew what she would do.

She would hurt Peter every bit as much as he had hurt her. She rushed up to the man and took his arm. He peered at her and she realised he was drunk.

‘Edyth?’

‘It is, Charlie.’

‘Thought you didn’t like me,’ he slurred.

‘I do now, Charlie.’

He gazed at her through half-closed eyes. ‘What you doing here?’

‘Didn’t you know, Charlie? I live here now, and you and me are going to take a walk.’

‘Where?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘Anna Hughes’s house. Haven’t you heard, Charlie? I’m working for her now. You want me, you can have me.’

He gave her a stupid drunken smile. ‘How much?’

‘How much are you willing to pay?’

‘That depends on what you are prepared to give.’

‘Whatever you want, Charlie. All you have to do is ask.’

‘And pay?’ he checked.

‘Whatever you think I’m worth, Charlie.’ She heard a man shout behind her and pulled Charlie forward. ‘Come on, it’s cold out here and we’re wasting time.’

‘Mrs Slater, Edyth, I don’t want any trouble …’

‘You won’t have any, Anna.’ After weeks of turmoil, during which her problems had seemed insurmountable, Edyth felt amazingly calm. It was as though a veil had lifted and revealed her life for the sham it had been. There was no solution that she could see to the mess that was her marriage, but it was a relief finally to realise just why she had failed as a wife.

Peter’s refusal to make love to her – his reluctance even to sleep in the same room. Mrs Mack’s rude, overbearing attitude, and the hold she’d had over Peter. The Bishop’s insistence that Peter could only become vicar of the parish if he were married. Harry’s warning to her the night before her wedding:
‘Some men aren’t the marrying kind.’
Alice Beynon’s remark when they had been talking in the garden after Florence had announced that she was moving into Tiger Bay with them:
‘Sons grow up and marry; it’s what normal men do. Although I admit I never expected to see the day that Peter would take a wife …

If only Harry had been more explicit. But if he had, would she have listened to him? Deciding the answer was probably not, she addressed Anna.

‘Tell me which room is free, so Charlie and I can use it.’

‘All our rooms are fully booked,’ Anna said forcefully.

‘Surely you have one free. Charlie will pay in advance.’ Edyth dug Charlie in the ribs with her elbow. ‘Won’t you, Charlie?’

‘What?’ He stared blankly at her.

‘Anna wants money.’ Edyth held out her hand.

‘Want money, do you …’ He swayed precariously, and Edyth realised he was not only drunk but bordering on comatose. He slipped his hand inside his coat, missed his pocket twice and eventually, after a great deal of fumbling, found his wallet. Holding it out with exaggerated care, he flourished it in front of her eyes before opening it and removing a ten-shilling note.

‘Foursh timesh your usualsh pricesh.’ He bowed to Anna. ‘Becaussh I like the ladyssh.’ He stood so far back on his heels he would have toppled over if Edyth hadn’t grabbed his waistcoat and steadied him. He wrapped his arm around her and grinned stupidly.

‘We haven’t any rooms,’ Anna snapped. Unfortunately for her, Colleen chose that moment to burst in.

‘Bloody man! Gave me two bob, nothing for the extras and kept me for over an hour …’ She picked up on the silence in the room, turned around, and saw Edyth and Charlie standing together. ‘What you doing here, Mrs Vicar?’

‘We want a room, I take it yours is empty?’ Edyth filched the money from Charlie’s hand and handed it to Colleen.

‘Ten bob!’ Colleen stared at the note before holding it up to the electric light as if she couldn’t believe her luck.

‘Which one is it?’ Edyth demanded.

‘Don’t take the money, Colleen. I told her all our rooms are fully booked,’ Anna snapped.

‘Ten bob’s ten bob. Notes like that don’t grow on trees.’ Colleen rolled the money into a tube and pushed it into a button-down pocket on the side of the silk camiknickers she was wearing beneath a sheer muslin robe.

‘Colleen, give it back,’ Anna ordered.

‘Come on, Anna,’ Colleen wheedled. ‘I’ll give you two bob out of it.’

‘I don’t want two bob. I want her and him,’ Anna pointed to Edyth and Charlie, ‘out of here. She’s trouble and he’s sozzled.’

‘Charlie’s always three parts to the wind and what’s it to us if the silly bitch wants a thrill? One thing’s for sure, she’s not going to get one from her pretty boy husband. Mind you,’ Colleen looked Charlie up and down. ‘Doubt Charlie’s up for much, state he’s in. Looks like Gertie had the best out of him this afternoon.’

Shocked, Edyth stared at Colleen.

‘Surprised we know your baby-faced vicar’s taste in the bedroom?’ Colleen took a cigarette from an open pack on the mantelpiece, lifted her leg on to a chair, struck a match and lit it. ‘Everyone in the Bay knows, love. Before he carried you over the threshold, there were sailors queuing at his door every night. And they weren’t there for Bible studies.’

Edyth had heard enough. ‘Which is your room?’

‘First door on your right at the top of the stairs. Don’t walk straight ahead or you’ll get an eyeful. Gertie’s got two in with her.’

Edyth tugged Charlie’s arm. Leering at the expanse of leg Colleen was showing, he ambled out behind her. When they were in the passage Edyth heard Anna speaking low, urgently to someone in the kitchen: ‘Run as fast as you can, straight down to the Norwegian mission. Get Mr Holsten. No one else will do. Micah Holsten, got that? Tell him to get here as quickly as he can.’

Edyth didn’t wait to hear the reply. It was a good half-hour walk to the mission and back, and by then it would be too late.

Edyth lay on the bed next to Charlie and stared at the ceiling. Darkness had fallen but she had left the electric light on. The plaster was cracked with a filigree network of grey lines, and there were cobwebs in the corners of the coving. But the neglect didn’t extend to the rest of the room. It was clean and dusted, if cluttered. The thing that had struck her most about Colleen’s bedroom when she’d walked in was how ordinary it was. Just like the kitchen.

The bedroom suite was cheap, veneered deal, and not particularly well cared for. There were white heat rings and stains on the surfaces of the cabinet and dressing table where cups of tea and perfume and cosmetic bottles had stood. A chair in the corner was heaped to overflowing with frocks, petticoats, silk stockings and robes. Another corner was filled with a pile of slippers, boots and shoes.

Charlie snorted loudly and began to snore, making more noise than the cows when they calved on her Uncle Victor’s farm. Like her, he was lying on top of the beige satin bedcover. He’d point-blank refused to get into the bed, and had fallen flat on his face on the mattress after shouting, ‘Donsh wansh to get in thosh sheets, donsh know whosh bensh in them.’

He’d struggled to his feet a few minutes later and tried to unbutton his trousers, only to get so hopelessly tangled in the legs that she’d had to help him pull them off.

Unable to stand the noise Charlie was making another moment, she sat up, swung her legs to the floor and picked up her stockings from the foot of the bed where she’d left them. She rolled one on then the other, clipped them on to her suspenders, left the bed and went to the tallboy where she’d draped her woollen frock. She pulled it over her head and, by lifting her arms as high as they would go behind her back, managed to fasten the buttons. Her shoes were on the floor beneath the bed, her coat on a hook on the door. Her hat and handbag were stacked next to a litter of lipsticks, face powder, cigarettes, ashtrays and empty scent bottles on the dressing table.

She glanced around the room to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything. Then she looked down at Charlie, sprawled on his back, dressed only in his vest – and still snoring. She felt in her pockets and opened her handbag to look for something she could leave him as a memento. All she could find was a lace handkerchief. She upended her perfume bottle on it and dropped it on his chest. She opened the door quietly, closed it behind her and went downstairs.

The hall was tiny and, like most two-up two-down terrace houses, the front door was directly opposite the stairs with barely enough room for the door to open inward. She had just closed her hand on the doorknob when she heard, ‘Hello, Edyth.’

She turned. Micah Holsten was standing in the kitchen doorway.

‘I heard Anna asking someone to get you. I hoped you wouldn’t come.’

‘Someone has to talk sense into you.’ He closed the door behind him and walked towards her.

‘Why does it have to be you?’

‘I’m an expert at making the wrong sort of friends and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ He caught hold of her arm.

‘Let me go.’

‘No.’

‘I’m not going anywhere with you,’ she protested.

‘Yes, you are.’

‘And if I scream?’

‘The police would be amazed if a woman in this house didn’t scream. And I didn’t give you an invitation. It’s an order. For once in your life, you’re going to think of someone besides yourself.’

‘You think I’m selfish …’ After everything Peter had done to her, the last thing she wanted to do was listen to someone else’s hard luck stories.

‘Peter’s still your husband,’ he reminded her.

‘Why should I consider him after what he’s done to me?’

‘Because right now, he’s sitting in the vicarage knowing that he has lost everything he has ever worked for: people’s respect, a settled life, marriage – you. And possibly, if the Bishop ever hears what happened tonight, his career.’

‘Peter doesn’t give a damn about me.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong, Edyth, He does care for you. Very much.’

Micah had parked his van outside Anna’s house. He opened the door, pushed Edyth into the passenger seat, walked around to the driver’s side, started the engine and drove down towards the sea. He parked on the quayside overlooking the marina of small boats where the
Escape
was berthed, switched off the ignition and turned to face her.

The weather had broken while she had been in Anna’s. Rain was beating down, making rivulets on the windscreen, moving and darting in random patterns, sometimes sideways, sometimes upwards. Edyth found it easier to concentrate on the way the street lights reflected on the drops of water in the darkness, than to look at Micah.