Luckpenny Land (30 page)

Is that all you’re going to say? Aren’t you going to give me a lecture?’

‘Nope.’

She fell into a thoughtful silence and after a while slanted a look at him. She hadn’t known Thomas O’Cleary long but she had learned that he was an eminently unfussy person. Quiet, patient, usually keeping his opinions to himself. She liked that. Nor did he make any demands upon her. He hadn’t even tried to hold her hand when they’d gone to the pictures the other night. She couldn’t imagine that he didn’t fancy her. He was simply a man a woman could trust. Not like Jack Lawson who had not bothered to turn up when she’d asked him to, nor written to say why.

‘I can’t stay at my aunt’s for ever. I swear she’s getting suspicious. I might move into a flat, if I could find a job.’

‘Difficult to keep a job with a baby on the way, I would think. Unless you find someone sympathetic.’ They both knew the impossibility of that.

Kath sighed. ‘I suppose so.’

‘What about your family? Can’t they help?’ Silence again.

‘I take it you haven’t yet informed them of this joyous news?’ Kath was on her feet in a second. ‘If you’re just going to take the mickey...

Tam grabbed her ankle to stop her running off. ‘Don’t fly off the handle. All right, it’s got naught to do with me. But since you’ve told me the worst, I thought I might be allowed one or two questions.’

Kath sat down again but remained stubbornly mute.

‘I’ll start by telling you about myself, shall I? You know me name. I’m what you might call rootless. I came from Ireland originally and America more recently. I’ll work for the British even if I won’t fight for them. I’ll turn me hand to anything but I prefer working on the land. In the summer I did vegetable picking in Ormskirk, and now I’m working at a local yard. Though heaven knows what the war will do to racing. I muck out mainly, but they’re starting to trust me with the horses every once in a while, if not as often as I would like. There now, that wasn’t so difficult. Now it’s your turn.’

‘Some things can’t be talked of,’ Kath said at last, in a very small voice. ‘I just thought, there’s a war coming, we could all be dead next year, so what the hell?’

‘Did you love him?’

Kath paused a moment. ‘I don’t think so. Not sure I could love anybody. Mummy says I’m too selfish.’ She smiled, rather ruefully.

He grinned at her. ‘I cannot believe that to be true.’

‘You don’t know me. As for my family... Let’s just say that they would not approve. Bringing home an illegitimate baby would result in the "don’t darken my door" routine. Mummy could never take the scandal. It would ruin her reputation at the Ladies’ Circle.’

‘And what about
your
reputation?’

Kath laughed. ‘That’s ruined already. I’ll tell you about my best friend, Meg, instead.’

And so she did. About Meg and her young brother Charlie. About Ashlea and Broombank, Sally Ann and Dan. About swimming in Brockbarrow Tam and picnics on Kidsty Pike. She made no mention of Jack.

‘Katherine Ellis, these sheets have not been ironed.’

Kath lifted her eyes to the ceiling at sound of the shocked tones and whispered a silent oath. Caught out, she turned to face her aunt’s fury with her most winning smile. ‘I’ve smoothed them well enough. No one will notice.’

‘Don’t try cutting corners with me, girl, I always notice.’

You would, you sharp-eyed old cow. ‘I’m sure Mr Wilson won’t. He very rarely sleeps in these days. He spends more time at his fiancée’s house.’ There was light hearted mischief in her tone but Aunt Ruby did not respond to it, putting on her shocked expression.

‘I hope you are not judging my guests by your own standards?’

Kath became very still. ‘What do you mean by that?’

Ruby sniffed and fingered the glass beads over her flat chest. ‘You must know, my dear, that I have only your best interests at heart. Your mama would expect it of me. But I have to admit that I’ve seen you, walking along Lord Street with your young man.’

If Kath hadn’t felt so annoyed at being very likely followed on her afternoon off, she might have laughed at her aunt’s quaint way of speaking. She sounded very like a Victorian novel.

‘He is not my young man.’

‘Whatever he is, dear, you know nothing about him, now do you?’ No man had ever looked twice at Ruby Nelson. Rosemary had been the pretty one with boys falling over themselves for her attention. It had rankled then and it still rankled now that some girls found it so easy to find a man. ‘You have surely no wish to be accused of being...’ Ruby coughed delicately. ‘Loose is the word that springs to mind. That sort of behaviour does your reputation no good at all. Take my word for it.’

Kath’s cheeks went pink. ‘I’m not at all - loose, as you call it. And he isn’t my young man. He’s a friend. The only one I have here as a matter of fact.’

‘You should find yourself a decent girl friend from a respectable family.’ Ruby frowned. ‘I’ll speak to my neighbours. They may know of someone suitable.’

Kath stiffened. ‘There’s no need. I’m perfectly capable of choosing my own friends, thanks very much.’

‘But are you?’ Ruby wagged a finger at her niece, a chiding smile upon her face as if she were talking to a child with half a brain. ‘Mark my words, such lewd behaviour will bring you to no good.’

Kath’s cheeks burned with indignation. ‘Lewd? Walking along a main shopping street?’

‘People jump to conclusions.’

‘Then they shouldn’t.’

‘All I am asking is that you behave with a little more discretion.’

What would the old cow say if she discovered Kath had already come to no good, or fallen, as she would no doubt call it? Having a child out of wedlock would be a sin beyond redemption in Ruby Nelson’s eyes.

‘I’ll bear your advice in mind,’ Kath said coldly, and wondered why she’d ever agreed to come to Southport.

‘Splendid. Now strip those sheets off, like a good girl, and iron them properly before you put them back. Don’t think I won’t notice. Nothing slips past Madam Ruby, mark my words.’

If ironing sheets was a trial, washing them was worse. Kath had nightmares about the mangle. An old fashioned, turn-the-handle-if you-had-the-strength variety, Kath hated it with a venom.

Mummy had a new electric washing machine, a vacuum cleaner and a maid to operate these modern delights. Aunt Ruby, for all she had more sheets to wash, stuck to a dolly tub and posser. The mangle, with its vicious set of rollers, either stuck fast and chewed the sheets to ribbons or took your fingers with them. Every time Kath operated this equipment she felt exhausted for hours afterwards, and anxious over whether the effort would harm the baby. She might not want to keep the little mite herself but she wished it no harm.

Kath eased her aching back and suggested, quite politely, that Ruby might care to enter the twentieth century and buy a washing machine.

‘It’d be much easier to manage than this old dolly tub.’

She saw at once that this small criticism of the way things were done at Southview Villas did not go down at all well.

‘Electric washing machines are no substitute for good scrubbing, that’s what I say.’

Since you don’t have to do the scrubbing, , but Kath wisely kept that thought to herself. ‘Come to think of it, you could send all the linen to the laundry. That would save hours of work.’ Particularly for me.

‘It would cost a small fortune. Trouble with you young people today is you don’t know when you’re well off. I sometimes wonder why you stay, miss, since you seem to dislike it so much.’

There was a small silence, Kath for once at a loss for words. She couldn’t tell the truth. Ruby would inform her mother without delay. She had recognised a malevolent streak in her aunt during the weeks she’d been here. She called it ‘keeping up standards’. Kath recognised it as plain bloody mindedness.

‘I like the sea air, and there are things going on here, at the Winter Gardens and the pictures. Then there’s Liverpool quite close by. Westmorland is too boring for words.’

‘Hm.
’ Ruby gravely considered her niece. ‘Feeling better, are you then?’

‘Better?’

‘Your tummy upset passed?’

‘Oh, y-yes. I’m fine.’ Kath decided it would be politic to make no further complaints at present and started to fold the next sheet ready for the mangle. But Ruby was not one for letting things pass.

‘You’d tell me if there was something wrong, wouldn’t you, dear?’

‘What could be wrong?’ Hazel eyes opened wide with feigned innocence.

‘I owe it my sister, your dear mother, to see that you are properly taken care of. You are young yet, Katherine, and could easily fall prey to all manner of unspeakable sins.’

Kath sucked in her cheeks. ‘I’ll do my best to manage not to.’

‘I’m pleased to hear it. And should there be anything, anything at all on your mind, you must feel perfectly free to come and speak to me about it.’

Perhaps in view of this tricky conversation it was a touch reckless to allow herself to be lulled into saying what she did. But Kath had never been one to guard her tongue. She pushed back a damp lock of hair with a tired hand. ‘If you want to know, I think it’s time we had a bit more help around here. I don’t see you doing much these days.’

‘
I
beg
your pardon? I am the proprietress.’

‘I know, Aunt Ruby. But it’s not fair to leave everything to me. The washing, the cleaning and the bed making. Even most of the cooking. I can’t cope. Perhaps a young girl? Strong. Willing. I won’t be able to manage this job much longer on my own.’

Glassy eyes surveyed her unblinkingly.

‘I think we’ve had enough of willing girls around here.’ And with this enigmatic statement, Aunt Ruby left the scullery.

The following Saturday Kath and Tam arrived back later than usual, having taken a bus into Liverpool to a dance. Tam had insisted on walking her home from the bus station.

‘I don’t want you accosted in the blackout, or falling down any holes. I heard tell of one man who rode his bike straight into a tree. He thought he was on the road, d’you see, but the pavements are so wide here in Southport, he was riding on the pavement instead. He bounced up so high he landed on a branch and it was morning before anyone found him and brought him down.’

Kath was holding her sides with laughter. ‘What whoppers you do tell. It’s true about Irishmen and the blarney stone.’

Since it was pleasant to be mildly cosseted by a man, even one who hadn’t laid a finger on you, Kath was happy to let him walk her right to the door. They were still laughing, swinging along arm in arm as they rounded the corner, feeling young and happy, till Kath saw the lace curtain twitch in the front parlour window and the face of her aunt peering out.

Before she had time to lift the brass knocker the door was flung open. ‘As I thought. This is what you get up to, is it, miss?’

Kath swallowed the first bitter retort that came to her lips and turned, smiling, to Tam. ‘Thanks for seeing me safely back.’ And just to prove that she was twenty years old, twenty-one on 3 December, and could do as she pleased, she rested her hands on Tam’s wide shoulders and kissed him full upon the lips.

And with that little show of rebellion, sealed her fate.

The next morning Ruby was at her bedside a full twenty minutes before six-thirty, the usual time Kath was expected to rise and prepare breakfast.

‘Get up and put on a decent frock. No lipstick or fancy combs in your hair. Plain and respectable, no more nor less.’

‘Why? Is the king coming?’

‘I’ll take no lip, neither. I’ve had enough of your clever tongue, madam. Looking down your nose at me because I’m not so well placed as your darling mummy, and all the time walking the street with any Tom, Dick or Harry.’ Gone was the smiling, social front her aunt usually adopted. Ruby reached down and stripped the covers from the bed while Kath still lay in it, still not properly awake.

‘Here, what is this?’

‘When you’re dressed, finish stripping the bed and fold all the sheets. Then come straight to the kitchen. You can have a bit of breakfast before you go.’

‘Go? Go where?’

‘I’ve found you a job. You are to leave right away.’

Kath gasped. ‘What kind of job?’

But Ruby, having reached the end of her tether so far as this little madam was concerned, had nothing more to say. She marched from the room, glass beads clinking with indignation, and Kath had no option but to do as she was bid, anticipation and the smallest degree of disquiet beating a dull pulse deep in her stomach.

Greenlawns showed not a speck of grass to mark its name before an austere, grey-stoned exterior. A tall, gabled house, much larger than Kath had expected, it stood on the outskirts of Liverpool. It had taken a long bus ride to reach it but Aunt Ruby had said the place was prepared to offer her work, so here she was, dressed in her best blue suit with tan shoes and bag to match.

Kath had read in a magazine that a girl should look bandbox smart if applying for work in a city establishment. She carried only one small attaché case, Ruby having promised to send on her luggage later, on the railway.