A Song Twice Over (4 page)

So too might the hollow-cheeked woman standing nearby her, a widow by the look of her whose half dozen children would make it half a dozen times harder for her to find work or lodgings, and a hundred times more willing to offer her labour for the pittance fast becoming known as ‘Irish wages'.

So too might those other women, pressing against the splintering deck-rail in shrill excitement that held a high note of anguish, small-boned, wild-eyed children peering like weasels from every fold of their skirts.

So too might the furtive band of squatters, silent, alert, ragged beyond the comprehension of thriving, up-and-coming Liverpool whose citizens had never been reduced, like these, to living in open ditches beneath a shelter of branches in the good weather, digging themselves holes to survive the winter, making the journey now because some landlord had given them the passage-money to have them off his land and off his conscience.

‘Poor devils,' said Daniel Carey, sitting Cara's child on his shoulder and picking up her carpet bags, waiting his moment before hazarding himself, and her, among the fearful confusion on the dockside below, a kaleidoscope of human pieces carelessly shaken, heedlessly thrown down, sombre-coloured specks that were men and women huddling, settling a moment, starting off again in yet another wrong direction, falling. And not always picking themselves up again. The lucky few had relatives to meet them with wheelbarrows into which whole lifetimes of bags and boxes, a baby, a dazed old grandmother, were hastily bundled. The ‘squatters', in the manner of those accustomed to concealing themselves underground, had melted away as if they had never been. But the widow with her six children had simply walked six feet of hard-paved English ground and then, not knowing which way to turn and suddenly realizing the futility of turning anywhere, had sat down cross-legged on a paving-stone, her children about her, waiting in silent, well-mannered desperation for what would happen next. No longer even curious to wonder if it might be worse than what had happened before.

And what else but despair had brought her here in the first place? Daniel Carey had no need to ask her story. Her husband had died, judging by the ages of the children, about a year ago. And with him had gone the cottage and the couple of acres, repossessed by a landlord who did not care for the complications of a lone woman and infant children on his land. For there would have been no lease, no security of tenure, just a ‘tenancy at will', the ‘will'in question belonging to the landlord who might evict as and when he chose. And therefore, while she still had a few possessions that would fetch a few coppers, he had evicted at once. As he had evicted the squatters. Although that had been a long time ago.

‘Poor devils,' said Daniel Carey once more and then, his eyes narrowing, their expression hard and bitter, he shrugged and said ‘Ah well – it's better-fed we are and better-dressed than they. So I reckon we'll get by.'

‘We'll get by,' murmured Cara Adeane somewhat to herself, walking down the gangplank empty-handed, unencumbered, gracefully swinging her parasol. ‘Because we have better sense.'

She had expected him to leave her in Leeds. So had he. Yet when, late in the afternoon, they had located the alley her father had named, opening on to a littered courtyard behind Boar Lane, with the carter just about to set off on his Wednesday delivery of cheap dress goods to the milliners of Keighley and Bradford and Frizingley, he had said his goodbyes, wished her luck and then surprised her, although not himself – so much of his life being dictated by impulse in that way – by leaping into the already moving cart beside her.

‘I may as well see you to your father's door. It's not far. And it doesn't look like rain.'

Did she want his company now? Regretfully she admitted she did, although nothing obliged her to tell him so.

‘I thought you had friends in Leeds.'

‘That I do.'

‘Will they not be waiting?'

‘Hardly. I'm to visit the editor of the Leeds
Northern Star
. But there's no call for hurry – since he's in prison for printing treason.'

And leaning back against the bales of printed calico and housemaid's cotton he raised an amused eyebrow and smiled at her.

‘What treason?'

‘Oh –' and he sounded very far from alarmed about it. ‘Much as usual. That working men should have the vote. That members of parliament should be paid salaries so that men like me could get ourselves elected and keep our own bodies and souls together without being in the pay of my lord duke or my lord millmaster – and having to dance to his tune. You know the kind of thing.'

‘I do.'

‘And you don't care?'

‘What difference could it be making to me?'

‘It might. If I get elected who knows if I wouldn't make it law that all girls with black hair and blue eyes had to wear silk dresses? But for now I'll just see you on your way to Frizingley – satisfy myself that's
really
where you're going – and then I'll persuade this good gentleman carter to give me a lift back to Leeds again. I expect he'll be glad of the company on his homeward trail.'

But he had not climbed into the pedlar's wagon to air his views on electoral reform. He did not know why he was here, except that he had not yet had his fill of looking at her, which had seemed reason enough when he had chased the cart down the alley a moment ago and vaulted over the tail-board. Reason enough now. Why explore it? Particularly since that strange languor they had experienced on the crossing had come back again, warmer and sweeter and deeper – much deeper – than before, hushing them, lulling them, filling their entire, complicated, busy minds with the one simple, all-absorbing pleasure of
looking
, listening to the sound of the other's breathing, taking in the odours – like no other odours anywhere – of hair and skin, so that the rough, jolting miles and the scowling, dark grey mill villages blending one into the other on the road through Leeds to Bradford and then to Frizingley passed very nearly un-noticed.

The cart stopped.

‘Oh … Are we here?' Once again, as on the approach to Liverpool, she spoke with a slow-dragging reluctance, oddly fearful of the answer.

‘What a vile place.' And now it was Daniel who spoke resentfully, sullenly, as he retrieved her bags and her child from the cart-tail and set them on a sodden patch of unpaved ground.

Vile? Blinking rapidly, clearing her eyes of Daniel Carey and the bemused trance he had created, she looked for the first time at this place to which her father's letters had brought her. Not a pretty place, he had called it. And she saw that in that, at least, he was to be trusted.

She stood in a mean, dark street in the decaying centre of an old town, a pleasant enough place once, perhaps, before the belching chimney stacks of newly created industries had blackened it; even a quiet place before the demands of the factories for labour had caused workers' cottages to spring up like acres of ragged mushrooms around every mill-yard. While here, in the street to which her father had directed her, the tall, narrow houses, standing on what had once been a picturesque location with their backs to an old shipping canal – nauseous and gaseous now with industrial waste and human sewage – had lost their status as ‘residences'and become lodging-houses crammed far beyond their brim.

‘What a pest-hole,' he said, angrily, as if he held her to blame for it. ‘Is it better here you'd be than in a mud cabin in Tipperary?'

Yes. Although she could not tell him so. Because where could one mud cabin in Tipperary lead to except another? What could one aspire to in Tipperary? Whereas here, through the gloom and grime and the low, grey cloud – did it never lighten? – there would be ordinary men and women somewhere, not just lords and ladies as seemed always to be the case in Ireland, who wore fine clothes and drove fine carriages. She had her mother's word for that.

Nevertheless, a vile place, the light – such as it was – just fading, a hint of dampness in the heavy air, a crowd of indifferent passers-by, slouching heads down into the coming rain, who had seen too many arrivals and departures to pay much heed to yet another Irish girl with her glib chatter coming, as so many came and went, to a town already bursting at its seams with an alien population.

‘Well,' she said briskly. ‘Here we are.' And it was not a moment for promises and declarations, with the bags to be rescued from the hooves of the carter's heavy horses, the child to be prevented from falling in the gutter, a sense of impending family reunion, a chance that Odette might glimpse her grandson from a window and come rushing out to claim him; excluding Daniel. Not the moment. But would there ever be another? And it was then, for the first time, that he put a hand on her, his hard fingers touching fire into her skin, his mind already groping for words of love although his tongue could not yet employ them. So that he spoke to her instead – to hold her attention – in a manner he knew she would expect and understand.

‘You owe me, Cara,' he said.

She did not intend to deny it. For the journey had been difficult and without him she could so easily have been left behind in Liverpool, where there had been only one train that day with third class accommodation and ten people for every place on those sparse wooden benches. No roof, either just open wagons packed to bursting and Liam no longer sleepy and silent but screaming, terrified not so much by the scramble on the station platform but by its ferocity. As she had been scared herself – she knew it. For she was not always brave and calm and, with that frantic multitude struggling around her ready to kill and be killed for their right to board that train, she had lost her head thoroughly, seizing hold of Liam so fiercely in her dread of seeing him trampled underfoot that she had come near to suffocating him, until Daniel Carey had opened a way for her, less by brute force than by a steely and most effective determination.

And once inside the train she had sat for a long time gasping for breath, fanning herself with her hand, her nerve broken, covering her ears to Liam's whining, unable to bear it, unable to stop it, so that Daniel had taken the boy on his knee and pointed out to him, by way of distraction, the silk-hatted gentlemen ‘riding outside'on the roofs of the first-class carriages up ahead, as ‘sporting gentlemen' had always been wont to travel on the box of a stage-coach.

So his sweet-faced grandmother Odette would have spoken to him.

But then – as Cara swiftly reminded herself – so too would her father, the charming but entirely bogus
Dr
Adeane.

Manchester had been easier, the third-class carriage although open-sided, having a roof, which had proved a blessing with the rain coming on. But there had been a long delay, made bearable –
enjoyable
had she cared to tell the truth – by Daniel Carey's wit, the clean bench he had found her to sit on, the sponge cakes he had bought her, with what might have been the last of his money for all she knew, not from a street trader but from a proper baker's shop.

She had been – what? Moved by the gift? Ridiculously so. What remained in her mind was that they were the best cakes she had ever eaten. What remained in her mind, far too clearly, was that she had been happy sitting there, on a station bench, eating them. And sensations of happiness were rare with her. What her mind also retained was an anxiety equally rare – about how much, if anything at all he really did have left in his pocket, whether or not and how soon he could get more, whether or not she could risk offending him by offering to share the very little she had left in hers. Or whether or not she should contrive to give him the whole of it in some manner he could not refuse.

And this impulse of generosity to a stranger was the rarest thing of all.

Yet in Leeds he had been no stranger, striding ahead with Liam on his shoulder, teasing her because she could not keep pace with him, so that she had quickened her stride, taken up his challenge, arrived at the pedlar's yard laughing and breathless. And regretful.

‘I may as well come the rest of the way.'

How her heart had leapt.

But what was the good of it?

And now here was his hand on her shoulder, a caress which bit her to the bone, the whole of his lean, disciplined body an inch away from her; his slanting questioning smile.

‘You owe me, Cara.'

Yes. Of course she did. She acknowledged the debt fully and freely, with a surging gratitude of which she had not believed herself capable. Although she would not pay it. Naturally not. How could she take the risk, especially now when it had suddenly become not just the fear of another pregnancy to ruin her but the greater fear that she might go gladly to her ruin, with this man.

And so she would do what she had learned to do on such occasions. Promise and smile. Smile and delay. Break her word without shame, having too much to lose for guilt.

‘Yes. I owe you. I know.'

‘When can I see you?'

‘Tomorrow,' she said. It would always be tomorrow. If he came she would have a dozen excuses.
If
he came. To her own great surprise she suddenly threw her arms tight around him and kissed him, briefly, just a swift pressure of her closed mouth against his, but fiercely nevertheless, willing him not to come back and make her lie to him, willing him not to want her – while, at the same time, it seemed unbearable that she dare not want him.

‘Go to your mother,' he told her roughly. Gently.

Reaching out, making the familiar grabbing gestures which, from long practice, would automatically connect her hands to her carpet-bags and her son, she turned her head, her eyes stinging with tears, and ran.

She found the house at the steepest and narrowest part of the street called St Jude's and knocked on the door, registering only – and without too much surprise – that it was not the private dwelling her father had appeared to promise but a lodging of perhaps the middling variety, with not much more to offer, she supposed, than the airless back room she had just vacated in Dublin. But she would have that out with him later, her present need, like Liam's, being to see her mother, who would not strengthen her nor even advise her – being somewhat dangerously certain that those she loved must always be right – but who would simply offer so warm a welcome that the joy of it alone would be a balm.