Between Friends (21 page)

‘Say nothing, Meg, for God’s sake,’ Tom had pleaded. ‘I know you. You’ll open that big mouth of yours and we’ll all be without a job. Let’s get Cook better and the winter over and then we’ll see.’

She knew he was right but it was hard.
Hard
!
It was impossible
!

She turned back hotly to Harris. ‘He can’t be expected to live on less than he got as a young lad, Mr Harris. It’s not right!’

‘Then if he cannot manage on the wage I am offering he must look elsewhere!’

Tom’s voice was soft but the words seemed to have the greatest difficulty in leaving his closed jaw. Nevertheless he said them.

‘Thank you sir. I’ll manage.’

Meg looked at him bewildered by his servility.
She
wouldn’t put up with it if she were a man. If it wasn’t for Mrs Whitley she’d be away looking for another job right now. She wouldn’t stay here to be treated like dirt by this devil. He was bad and bad things would come from him. No, she’d get a room and knock on doors until she’d found something. Why, she could take up a position as housekeeper right this minute with the training Cook had given her. There wasn’t anything she didn’t know about running an establishment which catered to the needs of the traveller … and Tom … he could do …

Her furious thoughts were interrupted by Harris’ velvet voice.

‘You have something to say, Megan?’

‘Yes, I have. These people are …’

‘Cannot these people speak for themselves? Do they always need you to take up for them?’

Meg looked along the line of petrified servants. Frightened and puzzled they were for they were not completely sure why they were so afraid. Only Betsy, who had more ‘go’ in her than the others was aware of what was happening and when you are well past thirty and with no knowledge but how to scrub a floor and light a fire, anything was better than nothing! The other two women, with eyes like saucers, stared ahead of them numbly.

‘Of course they can, can’t you? Tom, Betsy, May. Tell Mr Harris you’re not willing to have your wages cut. Go on, stand up to him. Don’t let him push you around.’

But Betsy only clamped her mouth shut even tighter, throwing Meg a grim look, then, as though driven to it, not by Harris but by her said, ‘Be quiet, Meg. You don’t know what yer talkin’ about so just be quiet!’

‘A wise woman … er … Betsy … isn’t it? A bird in the hand, eeh?’

‘Yes sir,’ Betsy stared directly in front of her.

‘But Betsy …!’ Still Meg would not give in.

‘Be still, Meggie, for God’s sake be still!’ Tom’s voice was like ice!

Meg fell silent, defeated at last as she fought back the surprising
tears
. Why had Tom not stood up for her as she had for him? He was always the first to jump to her defence, even against those who bore her no real grudge, yet here was this devil treating them as though they had no more rights than beasts in a field and Tom was letting him do it!

She listened apathetically as Harris propounded on his plans for the future of the house. He meant to make it the most efficient, well-run house in the company, he said. He thought they would manage very well with Megan doing the cooking, implying that if she did not she had only to pack her bags and those of the sick cook and go elsewhere and by mid-afternoon he would have a replacement. There was only a small consignment – that was the word he used to describe the men, women and children who were to be in his care, as though they were merely so many pieces of baggage! He was certain Betsy and May – he smiled winningly at the two sisters who bobbed a curtsey apiece – could manage for now, with Fraser’s help. He was not sure of …
her
… he deliberated, looking at Emm who had been struck dumb since his arrival and gave the appearance of being mentally incompetent because of it, but they would see. She could work for her board and might be useful.

He dismissed them with a peremptory nod and made his way to the room he was preparing for himself on the first floor. It was a large room at the front, the best in the house, once used as a dormitory for the young, umarried girls who lodged there before embarking. He had decided it would do very well as a bedroom and study in which he might do his accounts he said, but it must be redecorated and furnished to his taste! He would stay at his club for the time being, he told them and they had looked at one another, not even sure what a club was! He would come in each day though to supervise the running of the house in Great George Square.

He did not tell them at what time, that way they would never be sure when they might find him looking over their shoulder!

THEY DID NOT
see a great deal of Martin that year. Their leisure time was so curtailed that even when he was home they could not get out to meet him more than a couple of times during the spring and summer, and then never together. Liverpool was celebrating its 700th anniversary of the granting of its first charter by King John, that year and the feeling in the air was one of great excitement and jubilation, though as Tom said sourly to Meg, there would be little jubilation going on in Great George Square! An era of great prosperity and development was taking place, Mr Harris told the servants pompously, including the extra four he had been compelled to take on as the house filled each week with a couple of hundred emigrants, and they must all work harder to ensure that it continued. He had taken it into his head, when they were almost prostrate with exhaustion at the end of each long day, to call them together to ‘educate them about what was going on in this great city’, he said and despite the fact that they were all of them wanting nothing more than to get to their beds, kept them standing, women in front, men behind, whilst he – sitting, naturally – ‘improved their minds with topics of the day’. He even read the newspapers to them, relishing his complete mastery of them and liking, one supposed, the sound of his own well-bred voice and though they were all Liverpool born and bred, knowing every ship which sailed from the port, felt bound to recount the news of the Cunard’s two crack liners, the
Lusitania
and the first
Mauritania
when they left for their maiden voyage.

Still thousands of emigrants from Central Europe, Scandinavia and Ireland, bound for the United States of America, Canada and Australia, poured into the city. Those who remained for more than a day or so were encouraged to take a tour of the city, to marvel at its flourishing splendour, to view the many passenger liners and cargo ships which jostled for a berth and to stare, awestruck, on the occasion of the grand opening of the new Cotton Exchange in Old Hall Street. They strolled the length of Lord
Street
, admiring its well-groomed traffic and glittering shops. They frequented the cheap cafés in Whitechapel and stared entranced into the shop windows of the clothiers and bootmakers for none were finer in the world. There was Stanley Street, noisy, narrow, sunless, filled with floats and lorries and carters and a red flow of horse drawn post office vans to the General Post Office Building. Bold Street, intimate, elegant, alive with fashionable ladies gliding across its wooden pavements, no electric cars nor sandwichmen allowed to disturb their peace and quiet, and Brunswick Street, its complete opposite, exclusively masculine with its banks and brokers, merchants and clerks.

And at the end of the day they came back to Great George Square. As many as 250 of them and Meg and Tom, Betsy, May, Emm and Mrs Whitley as she recovered from her winter cough were there to coax them into the large dining room, helped by the ‘casual’ maids and the young boy who was ‘under’ Tom. There they were fed, silently, efficiently, quickly! There was perfect harmony and order! Mr Harris insisted upon it and if they ate bread and margarine and endless and repetitious bowls of ‘scouse’ in which the cheapest cuts of meat, ‘scrag-end’, carrots and potatoes were cooked instead of the delicious and nourishing broths, casseroles, tripe and onion and cow heel which Mrs Whitley had once given them, what did it matter, what did
they
matter and did they know any better, he asked contemptuously, since they were the dregs, coming from the gutters of Europe!

The servants spent every hour of every day in the constant cleaning of passages and stairs and bedrooms, looking constantly, nervously over their shoulders for one never knew when he might come stealthily upon them, smiling his stoat’s smile as though to catch them taking a ‘breather’, an enjoyment he most definitely did not allow! The oppressive, unspoken threats, of what they did not really know, frayed their nerves to shreds and yet when they whispered about it in the frail warmth of the kitchen at night, what did he actually do? Nothing they could put a finger on. He was exacting in his passion for cleanliness but then so was Mrs Whitley! He did not shout, nor clout an ear as many a man in a position of authority had been known to do but the strangeness of his eyes, the foreboding, even threatening air of stillness which hung about him was enough to bring Emm to silent and unexplained tears. They would drip into her bucket of water which Mr Harris insisted must be changed for every square yard of floor
she
scrubbed – a daunting task when water must be heated on the open fire, then carried sometimes from cellar to attic – and wonder why, dwelling tearfully on the happy days of Mr Lloyd. She was overworked, that she understood, without the extra help Mr Lloyd used to hire to carry out the rough work in the summer, and underpaid with her already small wage cut by a shilling a week, but she was not cruelly treated.

She had never heard the words, despotic, oppressive but the tyrant who was now her master was both these and the happy balance of hard work but unworried composure she had known with Mrs Whitley under Mr Lloyd’s authority and benevolent rule was gone forever!

Christmas had passed them by without notice bar Meg’s fervent and daily surging prayer to some faceless, nameless deity that she might be given the strength to hold her clacking tongue until Mrs Whitley was sufficiently recovered for them all to look for other employment. She still had the bold courage and undiminished ardour which had been knocked out of poor Emm by years of uncomplaining servitude and the ‘crying shame’, as Meg forcefully put it when Harris was absent, of servants, particularly poor Tom, compelled to work twice as hard for almost half the money, was more than she could abide!

‘Please Meg, keep your trap shut!’ Betsy would beg of her. ‘If me an’ May lose these jobs it’s back ter me Mam’s an’ if yer could see the way we’re jammed in there yer’d not begrudge us this, even with ’im over us!’

Betsy was quite frantic in her pleading, afraid it seemed that Mr Harris might throw her and May out along with Meg if he was crossed. It was alright for Megan Hughes to go ranting on about injustices and the inexcusability – whatever that might mean – of taking advantage of those not able to defend themselves against exploitation – whatever
that
might mean – but she and May were a part of a tortuous family working arrangement in which every member was involved, from her Dad who got employment when he could at casual dock labouring to the youngest who was a road crossing sweeper! Take away two parts of that arrangement and the whole would fall apart and no longer function!

So Meg kept her trap shut! Like Betsy and May and Tom she had no option to do otherwise. There was the frailty of Mrs Whitley to protect and the vulnerability of simple Emm to be
considered
. Already Meg’s savings were dwindling away and the anguish of parting with what was to be the start of a new life for them all was cruelly heart-breaking. When she could she sneaked a few lumps of ‘Hemingway’ coal into the bucket kindly lent to her by Mr Harris, carefully re-arranging the black heaps in the cellar so that Mr Harris would not notice.

But those weeks of waiting seemed beset with perils. He would follow her about the house, standing in doorways, arms carelessly folded, watching her as she changed beds, polished floors, baked bread and ironed sheets. She would feel a compelling urge to turn, to stand, hands on hips and demand cuttingly what the devil he thought he was doing? Didn’t he trust her to perform properly the work she had been doing for five years, she wanted to say, but her will would force her to silence for she knew he waited only for a chance to rouse her to temper and impassioned resentment. His insolent regard, amused, mocking, touched the back of her bare neck and she would feel the instinct to flinch. He appeared to derive enormous pleasure from her obvious discomfiture and she longed to slap his narrow, sallow textured face if only to see his arrogant smile knocked away in rage. That she could bear, for she could meet it with her own!

But she knew she must not!

When she worked in the kitchen, doing the cooking which was now an added and accepted part of her duties besides those for which she was employed, he would stroll in and sit at the table, not saying a word and his eyes would slide about her figure and her rosy, inflamed face as though daring her to object. She would stare defiantly, her mettlesome spirit hungering to set about him with a frying pan but, control clasped tightly to the inner vision of her future, of all their lives, she kept still and silent.

The only pleasure, the only brief but joyful moments in the drab uniformity of Meg and Tom’s hard life was the news they had of Martin’s success. He had done well in the Irish trials, mastering the dread Ballinslaughter Hill Climb in the ‘Hemingway flyer’ and was fast gaining a reputation as an ‘up and coming’ young racing driver. In an early encounter at South Harting he had been involved in a challenge match, amongst others, with the formidable lady driver, Miss Levitt, whose christian name appeared to be unknown, owing perhaps to the gentlemen racing drivers aversion to her impertinence in daring to breach their
strictly
male preserve, and he had gone on to win a prize at the ‘Gordon Bennett’ at Hamburg!