For Many a Long Day (11 page)

‘What about it then?’ Ellie asked, turning to them both.

‘Lovely, Ellie. Yes, please. When?’

‘Saturday night?’

Susie nodded vigorously

‘I’m goin’ to the pictures m’self that night, Frank Armstrong asked me to go,’ Daisy said, blushing furiously. ‘But sure he’s only doin’ it to be polite.’

‘Then we can go one night next week,’ Ellie said, trying not to smile, ‘providing it suits the others,’ she added and looked away quickly to avoid catching the twinkle in Susie’s eye.

‘Ach come away on in chiledear. Come in. Isn’t it great to see you? You’re well on time, just what ye said in your letter. Isn’t it handy that the driver stops for you outside the door instead of you havin’ to go inta town and out again. Here let young Bobby take your case.’

Ellie hugged her aunt awkwardly in the narrow hallway as twelve year old Bobby pulled her case from her hand.

‘Bobby, don’t take it up,’ she called after him, as she disentangled herself from her aunt’s embrace and saw him heading for the equally narrow stairs. ‘Take it into the kitchen, will you please?’

‘It’s powerful heavy, Ellie. Is it
all
dresses?’ he asked, hauling it round the awkward corner where the staircase rose sharply just outside the kitchen door.

‘No, it’s
not
,’ she said, pretending to be cross. ‘It’s Bramleys and butter from Robinson’s and maybe the odd sweetie,’ she called to him, as he humped the heavy case across the cold, tiled floor. ‘And there are some eggs from Ma,’ she said to her aunt as they followed him ‘But I thought they’d be safer in my shoulder bag,’ she added, slipping it off gingerly and laying it on the bare boards of the
well-scrubbed
table.

‘Ye never come empty-handed, do you, Ellie?’

‘The Bramleys are only windfalls, but some of them are perfect. I think they just dropped with their own weight. It’s a great crop this year.’

‘Apple-tart, Ma?’

‘Aye, we might just manage that,’ Annie Magowan said cheerfully as Ellie opened the suitcase on the floor, picked out the Bramleys one by one, found the well-wrapped pound of butter and handed over a bag of toffees.

‘Thanks, Ellie. Those are great. My favourites. Can I take the case up to the attic now?

‘Aye, away on,’ Annie said abstractedly, a large, perfectly formed apple held to her nose. ‘They’re never the same from the shops, though I buy them sometimes,’ she said breathing in the fresh, autumn
smell. ‘I can niver get used to payin’ money for what was always given free. Sure we had the run of all Robinson’s orchards to take whatever we wanted, even if it hadn’t fallen on the ground,’ she said with a little laugh as she put the apple down and turned to fill the kettle at the sink.

‘Sit down an’ rest yerself while I make us a drop of tea. Yer Uncle John’s listening to a programme on the wireless. He’s stopped drinkin’ tea in the evenin’. Cocoa is the
great
thing now. But it’s too early for that yet.’

Ellie smiled to herself and watched her aunt light the gas. A thin, almost emaciated woman, she had the same narrow face as her brother Robert, but unlike his tanned and worn skin, hers was pale, creased and parchment-like.

Five years older than her father, Aunt Annie had married at the first possible opportunity, though by that time her own mother, Mary-Anne, was already dead and her step-mother, Selina was trying to create a more kindly home for her three step-children.

Selina came too late. The harm was done
, was what Annie had once told Ellie. The house by the forge had nothing but unhappy memories for all three of Mary-Anne’s children. Annie had married a farmer from Ballyards, Thomas had gone to Canada and never came back, and her father, the youngest of the three, always swore he couldn’t remember his mother at all.

Annie’s had been a reasonably happy marriage though not exactly a love match. John Magowan had something of the hypochondriac about him. He disliked the countryside and had never wanted to be a farmer, so Annie encouraged him to move to the city. He’d got a job as a milkman, looked about him and ended up using the money from the sale of the farm to buy a run-down corner shop on the Woodstock Road. They’d lived over the shop, stayed open from early morning till late at night, until three children and their savings made it necessary and possible to make a move. By dint of letting out the best room to a lodger, they were able to afford the rent of both a tall, terrace house on the Lisburn Road as well as a less run-down grocer’s shop a couple of minutes walk away. Now that Ruth and her younger brother Tommy were both out at work, the lodger was no longer needed and Annie had more time to accommodate John’s regular requests for changes in his diet, along with the newest in tonics and vitamins.

‘Ye must be tired, an’ you at your work this mornin’,’ said Annie, as she poured their tea. ‘Ruth said she wouldn’t be late, but this fella asked her to go to a dance.’

‘The one she told me about? Norman?’

‘Ach no, this is
another
one. You know Ruth,’ her aunt said, shaking her head and passing over the milk jug. ‘What about this man of
yours
? Any word of him sending your ticket yet?’

Ellie shook her head and drank her tea thirstily.

‘He says the money’s good, but he’s had a lot of expense. I don’t think he’s been able to save much at all yet.’

‘Ach sure they all think America is made of money. But it’s the same everywhere. There’s some just puts their hands out and money drops into it and others could work till the cows come home and hardly buy enough to keep themselves fed. D’you fancy goin’ to Canada?’

‘I don’t know, Auntie. I really don’t know. I think of Polly and I’d love to be near her. And of course I want to marry George,’ she added quickly. ‘If his uncle produces a better job as he says he will, then Canada it has to be.’

‘D’ye think Polly’s happy out there?’

Ellie thought about it as her aunt offered her more tea. She’d never been quite able to make up her mind how Polly felt.

‘Polly’s always been good at making the best of anything. Even when she was a wee girl. I know she loves Jimmy, but it’s been hard on her since he lost that good job in Toronto and they had to move,’ she said sadly. ‘I think she’s too easy on the wee boys and they give her a bad time, which doesn’t help. Sometimes I know she’s tired out. But I can’t make up my mind whether she’s happy or not. I just know I miss her,’ she added abruptly.

‘You and her were always close. I still wonder
was I right at all to let her bring Jimmy here for his tea that week she was up and she’d only just met him. The next thing we knew they were getting married because he’d had the offer of a job out there better than he’d ever get here and he didn’t want to go without her. She took a big chance there, didn’t she?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Ye meet a man at a dance and ye get on well together and the next thing it’s down the aisle. Sure how can you know the half of it, just walkin’ out and goin’ to this dance or that picture? I walked round every inch of Salter’s Grange with John, but I’d had no idea about him at all till we started workin’ together in the shop. An’ I’ll say this for him, he always worked hard, but if I’d fallen on the floor in a dead faint, he’d never have said: ‘Are you tired?’ Yet he’d go out and spend a shilling on a bunch of flowers for me,’ she ended, with a wry laugh.

Ellie yawned and apologised.

‘For goodness sake ye must be tired out. Why don’t you go on up to bed? Ye’ll see yer Uncle John and Ruth in the morning. And Tommy’s coming home for the day. Either he wants to see you or he’s bringin’ me his washin’,’ she said laughing. ‘I’ll not come up with you if you don’t mind. One flight up to the lavatory is one thing, but the other two I’ll leave to you and Ruth.’

Tired as she was, Ellie felt better when she sat on the edge of the narrow single bed, took off her shoes and unbuttoned her dress. She took out her nightdress, but made no move to put it on. Instead, she switched off the electric light, went to the window and looked out across the roofs of the houses below, towards the Bog Meadows and the slopes of the mountains beyond.

There were lights in all the little houses along Moonstone Street. In uncurtained kitchens women were making the last tea of the day. Behind pulled blinds or drawn curtains shadowy figures moved, bedspreads were being turned back, Sunday clothes laid out for the morning.

It was so strange to look out over row upon row of houses. All these people living side by side, unknown to her and as surely to each other. She raised her eyes again into the moonless night, seeking out the tiny sparks of light where small farms lay on the gentler slopes that ran up to the steep edge of the great escarpment towering over the city.

White Mountain, Black Mountain and Divis. Until she had come to Belfast, she’d never seen a mountain before. Tonight, it was the dark of the moon and she’d have to wait for morning to see that sharp edge she remembered so well between one visit and the next.

Such an excitement it had been when she’d first come with Polly. She discovered the city was never
quiet. Even if she woke in the night, disturbed by some particularly sharp sound from the broad, metal acres of the railway sidings beyond Moonstone Street, she could still hear a quiet roar as if all the houses were breathing in their sleep. There were always lights on too all through the night.

Away to her right, she could see the regular rows of bright patches marking the wards of the Royal Victoria Hospital, a huge building where once as a little girl they had gone to visit Uncle John, tramping through a maze of corridors that left her exhausted and confused.

Would it be like this in Canada? Looking out from a top window over some unknown city that never slept? Would it feel as strange and different standing there with George as once this city had felt when she’d first come to it from the little green hills with the sodden meadows between, the twisty lanes and the apple-orchards and everything around her known and familiar?

You got used to it
, was what Polly had said. Yes, of course. She’d got used to working in the shop, become familiar with the till and counting out change and cutting fabric and knowing not to be upset with customers who were rude. That was just part of growing up and learning to do one’s work. But something told her going to Canada would be different, very different. Somehow she couldn’t see what the difference was. Yet she was sure there
was 
a difference between the new experiences that had flowed into her life during her first twenty years and this new experience that lay ahead of her, in Canada, with George.

She left the window open as she undressed, the night warm and the small room stuffy. From the marshalling yards came the clank and groan of goods wagons being manoeuvred into sidings or coupled up for night journeys. She got into bed and lay in the darkness looking up at the dark sky. There were no stars in the city either.

Sunday was a happy and lively day at 621, Lisburn Road. Despite a recurrence of his sciatica, Uncle John was able to walk as far as the newsagents for his usual Sunday paper. Tommy arrived late morning by train and tram from his living-over-the-shop employment in a men’s outfitters in Bangor. Wearing a new sports coat and flannels, his woolly hair well slicked back with Brylcreem, he carried a small box of chocolates for his cousin and a bulging carrier bag for his mother.

‘Ach, Tommy, a present for me, sure you shouldn’t have troubled yourself. Will I open it now or later?’ she asked effusively, as he handed it over.

Annie’s teasing was as good-humoured as Tommy’s when he proceeded to enquire after his ‘wee cousin up from the country’. Bobby wanted to know how many
more
dress patterns his big sister had bought since Ellie had been up last year, while Ruth had insisted that if it weren’t for the dress patterns there’s be less chance of the odd threepence
for him. There was much laughter throughout the morning and good appetites were displayed by all at the special meal Annie had prepared on the ancient gas cooker that smelt of gas even when not in use.

‘Will I give the rest of this to the birds?’ asked Tommy soberly, as he carried the plate that had held the apple tart back into the kitchen.

‘No don’t do that’, said Ruth seriously. ‘They might only fight over that one crumb.’

After Tommy and the two girls had done the washing up, Bobby disappeared to meet a lad from Moonstone Street. Annie and John settled for a wee doze in their respective armchairs leaving the three young people to go for a walk. They made their leisurely way westwards along the leafy avenues and lanes till they came to the banks of the Lagan. Standing on the King’s Bridge looking upriver towards the old brickfields, they watched a flotilla of swans sailing towards them in perfect formation, their images reflected in the brown water.

The afternoon was warm and pleasant, only the chestnuts seriously marking the advancing season, their pink and gold leaves fluttering down to lie on the dry pavements as they passed. Late flowers still bloomed prolifically in the allotments that lined large parts of the avenues between the Lisburn and Malone roads, sweet peas clustered at the highest point of the pea sticks provided and the dahlias
stood at attention, red and yellow, as bright as traffic lights.

Ellie enjoyed every moment of her unaccustomed leisure. She put out of mind the laundry that would be waiting till next Saturday afternoon, the blouses she would have to wash and iron for her return to work. Poor Da, she thought suddenly, as she eyed an impressive pair of wrought iron gates he would most certainly have stopped to examine and admire. He’d said he could manage for a week and he always did, but unless her mother got tired of his hit-and-miss cooking, he’d not get a decent meal till she got back home.

‘I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you beautiful ladies after tea,’ said Tommy sadly, as they strolled down from Notting Hill, crossed the Malone Road and turned towards home.

‘I take it there’s an even
more
beautiful lady in Bangor,’ said Ruth, laughing and tossing her dark curls.

She turned away from him and gazed across the road, taking in every detail of one of the handsome, double-fronted houses. Approached by short, gravelled drives, decorated with pillared porches and colourful flowerbeds and discreetly screened by flourishing shrubs and young trees the comfortable residences of Cranmore Park looked out over the trees to the park itself. They stood solid and quiet in the sunshine of a peaceful Sunday afternoon.

‘No, I fear not,’ he said soberly. ‘A much less happy reason. The boss’s brother is on the Board of Guardians of the Workhouse. He says there’s going to be trouble tomorrow. There’s a strike of relief workers and he’s not sure how it will affect the city. He’s taking no chances, wants to make sure we’re in the shop in Bangor at 8 a.m. so I was only let come home on condition I go back tonight,’ he explained crisply.

Ellie thought of Charlie Running. She’d not spoken to him since that evening in the forge when he’d sat on the bench inside the door and said there’d be trouble in the city. Now, as they strolled on in the sunshine, all he’d said to her about unemployment in the city came back to her. She made up her mind to ask Ruth and Tommy the questions she would have put to Charlie.

‘We’ve a wee while yet to teatime,’ said Tommy, as they approached one of the park gates. ‘C’mon and we’ll go and sit on a seat an’ I’ll tell ye all I’ve heard. Sure if we walk on down through the park, it’s only a couple of minutes home.’

Ruth wasn’t the slightest bit interested in the plight of the unemployed, so she left it to Tommy. It seemed they’d just put forward a new demand for an increase in payments to fifteen shillings for a man, eight shillings for a wife and two shillings for each child. Ellie listened, wide-eyed, wondering how you could feed a family even if they got the increase they were asking for.

But it wasn’t just money for food. How could they pay their rent? And what about fuel? The afternoons were still warm but the nights had started to get cold. When the sky had cleared last evening and Uncle John had announced there’d be a frost before morning, she’d been glad of the extra blanket Ruth had brought her.

She shivered at the very thought of a family that couldn’t afford a fire, of the men tramping through the city looking for work that was seldom to be found. According to Tommy, the shipyards had no orders, the linen mills were closing one by one as the depression bit deeper and other manufacturing companies were just as affected.

‘But why, Tommy? Why are places closing like this, what’s happening and why doesn’t the government do something to help these poor people?’

‘You’re not the only one asking that, Ellie. It’s
not
the government’s fault there’s a depression. It started in America and now it’s spread across the world. As far as I can get the hang of things it’s about money and powerful business interests and banks. You could hardly credit how wicked people can be when all they want is money.’

He paused, the look on his face more sombre than Ellie had ever seen it before, his dark eyes a confused mixture of anger and sadness.

‘People say our government
could
do more, if
they wanted to,’ he continued. ‘But they don’t seem to care and that’s what’s making people so angry.’

Suddenly and quite unexpectedly, a small cloud, generated by the warmth of the afternoon, moved across the sun. It cast a chill shadow across the green-painted summer seat, where they sat side-by-side watching the well-dressed inhabitants of Marlborough and Cranmore taking their Sunday afternoon stroll. As if someone had flicked the switch in her attic room, the light went out and all the colour was drained from trees and flowers and women’s dresses.

‘I think it’s time we were going home for our tea,’ said Ruth briskly, as she got to her feet. ‘There’s nothing any of us can do so there’s no good talking about it,’ she added, as Ellie and Tommy stood up. ‘We just need to make sure we don’t land up like that ourselves. Isn’t that right, Ellie?’

Her tone was so sharp and dismissive, Ellie was shocked. She glanced at Tommy to see how he’d taken it. He shook his head sadly, but he said nothing. Suddenly, she was aware that the difference she had always sensed between herself and Ruth had grown much wider.

As they moved off down the path, they became aware of a pleasant-faced, elderly woman coming towards them, walking with the aid of a stick and holding the arm of a middle-aged man. The three young people stepped off the narrow path to let
them pass and Ellie smiled and said a friendly ‘Good Afternoon.’ Both man and woman returned the greeting courteously as they drew level.

Ellie was glad of the slight diversion for it allowed her to avoid responding to Ruth’s question. Clearly, the plight of the unemployed was not a subject Ruth wished to discuss.

‘D’you think you’re doing the right thing at all over George?’ Ruth asked, as she finished applying cream to her face.

She passed the small pot over to Ellie, who sat on the end of her cousin’s bed, still wearing her best dress.

Ellie sniffed at the perfumed face cream in the pretty little pot. There was nothing devious about Ruth. If she was sometimes hurtful or tactless, it was never intentional. She was kind and good-natured, but she didn’t believe in beating about the bush.

It was almost a relief she’d taken the chance of this quiet moment to ask about George. Although Ruth’s visits to Salter’s Grange were brief and infrequent, because she couldn’t stand her Aunt Ellen, she’d been there often enough to have met George himself and to have cast an appraising eye over him. Unlike Daisy, at least Ruth had met him.

‘I know you say you love him, Ellie, or at least you
think
you do, but you’ve never been out with anyone else. How do you know you mightn’t love
someone else far more if you ever let yourself give it a try?’

She broke off, instructed Ellie in the correct way to apply skin cream to her face, then continued.

‘George is perfectly all right, nice looking, speaks well for a country boy, but has he any sense? It all sounded great going off to Canada, but how much has he saved? How long do you think it’ll be before he comes home for you or sends your ticket? Besides there’s
you
to consider too. Do
you
really want to go out there?’

The questions struck a familiar note. Daisy was younger, less confident than Ruth and much less willing to upset her, but she had asked the very same ones.

‘But Ruth, even if I wasn’t entirely happy about going, I’ve said I’ll marry him and women have to go where their man’s job is. You know that. That’s why Polly went to Toronto and now Mary is going to Indiana. I’m sure if Florence found a man she wanted to marry, she’d go wherever he went.’

‘Aye, if she ever found a man,’ said Ruth dubiously. ‘Or maybe that’s why she’s never let herself find one. Anyway, you and George aren’t engaged yet, are you?’

‘Well, not exactly, but …’

‘If he’d had any gumption about him, he’d have bought you a ring,’ Ruth said sharply. ‘It needn’t have cost much. Even a dress ring would have done.
It’s more the look of the thing. And he could have borrowed the money from his uncle, given the big pay he was going to have,’ she went on firmly. ‘What did happen about that motor-bike? Did you ever ask him?’

Ellie shook her head.

At twenty-two, it could certainly not be said that Ruth was uninformed about the ways of young men. Since she’d begun work in a small dress shop on the Lisburn Road itself, her one ambition was to get on, get a better job, earn more money, have enough to let her dress as she chose, go to the dances she preferred and mix with the kind of young man more likely to live in the leafy avenues of south Belfast than in the crowded streets off the Woodstock Road where she herself had first seen the light of day.

So far, however, Ruth had not found a partner that met her exacting requirements. She had plenty of invitations out, certainly, and she accepted many of them, but she would never go out more than twice with a young man who did not appear to have ‘prospects’.

‘What about this man you met at the Tennis Club, Sam Hamilton? What’s he like?’ Ruth asked, as she took off her dress, hung it carefully on a hangar and shook out the skirt.

‘He’s very nice.’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Ellie, if the Devil himself put a hat over his horns and said ‘Good morning’ to you, you’d say he was nice,’ said Ruth irritably.

Ellie laughed. Partly it was the unfamiliar image of the Devil wearing a hard hat that flashed across her mind, partly the look of complete outrage on Ruth’s face.

She stopped laughing and tried to see Ruth’s point of view. Perhaps being much more experienced, Ruth could see things she couldn’t see herself. But then, Ruth had made up her mind about what she wanted and she hadn’t had to because George had always been a part of her life. He’d never been a boyfriend, or an admirer, or a ‘catch’, or any of the other words Ruth might use about the many young men she’d encountered.

‘Ruth dear, I couldn’t let George down when he hasn’t done anything he shouldn’t have done. He had to take the chance of going to Canada. I made a promise, or rather, we had promised each other … well, as you know we’d planned to get married as soon as something turned up. We’d both been saving, but neither of us wanted to move in with the Robinson’s. There wasn’t room anyway …’ she broke off, aware suddenly that what she was saying didn’t seem to explain anything.

‘I suppose it’s different in the country,’ admitted Ruth grudgingly. ‘There’s not much work going apart from farming. Oh Ellie, would you really have wanted to be a farmer’s wife?’

‘But I wouldn’t be “a farmer’s wife”, I’d be George’s wife.’

‘If a house had come up, do you really think you’d have got married?’

‘Well, the problem wasn’t
just
finding a house. We couldn’t have lived on ten shillings a week. George’s father would have had to give him a bit more to make up for his free bed and board and his clothes, but there was no use asking him about that until we had a place to go. So George said.’

‘And I suppose Freeburns wouldn’t let you stay on after you were married, even for a few months.’

‘No,’ said Ellie shaking her head sadly. ‘That’s one advantage of the mills. They’ll take a woman and not even notice if she’s months gone, providing she doesn’t take more than a week or two for the birth. At Freeburns, like all the other good shops and offices, you get your wedding gift and you have to go.’

Ruth yawned hugely, a way she had of showing she’d had enough of a conversation. Ellie stood up, ready to step across the tiny divide between the two attic rooms.

‘You know, Ellie, that blue really suits you,’ Ruth added, looking her up and down as she stood in the doorway. ‘You’re a very good-looking girl if only you’d pay a bit of attention to yourself. Come to think of it, maybe George ought to pay a bit more attention to getting that ticket. Or someone will give him a run for his money.’