Mary's Child (14 page)

She did not mind; after all, she had been doing all this on her own for almost a year. And when all was done, including most of the ironing, Agatha would tell her with that thin-lipped smile, ‘Now you have a rest, dear.’ So when Daniel returned he found Chrissie sitting by the fire while Agatha finished the last of the ironing with a flourish.

Once he frowned and commented, ‘Taking it easy, lass?’

And Agatha cut in quickly before Chrissie could answer, ‘The lass seems worn out. She was busy earlier on. Mind, I don’t think I got tired like that when I was her age. But she seems well enough. Aren’t you, Chrissie?’ Again with that smile.

Chrissie agreed meekly, ‘I’m fine.’ And for a time she was bewildered, could not see what was happening. Then, though slowly because this was foreign to her own nature, she realised how she was being manipulated. But she was still bewildered because she could not understand why Agatha was doing this to her.

Once, when they were alone, with all the men out at work, she asked, ‘Agatha, please, I don’t know why but I think you’re trying to make me look as if I’m lazy.’ She was almost crying with nervousness and confusion.

The woman looked at the girl, still only fourteen years old, and smiled. ‘I don’t know what you mean, dear. I’ve never said you were lazy.’ Agatha’s eyes glittered. ‘But Daniel was saying the other night that you seem to sit about the place a lot instead of getting on.’

‘But I
do
work! It’s just that I happen to be sitting down when he comes home.’

‘Well, he’s bound to believe the evidence of his own eyes, isn’t he? You couldn’t argue with him over that, could you?’ And as Chrissie stood silent, Agatha went on, ‘But that’s enough of that. It’s time those bedrooms upstairs were turned out. They look as if they haven’t been touched for years!’

Chrissie protested, voice breaking, ‘But they have! I did them only—’

But Agatha was already urging her towards the foot of the stairs, one hand in her back. ‘We haven’t time to talk all day, girl!’

Then there came a night in November, just two months after Agatha had moved in, when Daniel stabled Bobby and walked in at the kitchen door. He halted there, swaying, lifted a hand to his head then fell flat on his face on the floor. Chrissie ran to drop on her knees at his side while Agatha shrieked and stood by the fire with her hands to her face. Chrissie listened to Daniel’s stertorous breathing while she loosened his shirt at the neck. She heard voices in the passage and shouted, ‘Ronnie!’

He came running, with Joe Gorman and Mickey Barker, two of the lodgers who worked at Ballantyne’s yard, pounding at his heels. He stooped over her, shocked, and asked, ‘What’s wrong with me dad?’

‘I don’t know! He just collapsed! Run and fetch Dr  Simmons!’

He turned and dashed down the passage, boots drumming on the boards, and out into the street. Chrissie turned to the lodgers and asked, ‘Will you carry him in to his bed, please?’

Mickey and Joe lifted his loose body, shuffled into the front room and laid him on the bed. As they stood back, Agatha pushed between them and demanded, ‘Get out of here now. I’ll see to him. Chrissie! Take off his boots! The bedspread will get filthy!’

Dr Simmons came within minutes, in a cab that rattled up the street at a canter, bouncing and rocking on the cobbles, and pulled up at the front door with the horse blowing. Curt and smelling of wintergreen ointment as usual, Simmons examined Daniel with Agatha at his back while Chrissie waited on the other side of the closed door, in the kitchen where Agatha had thrust her.

Agatha waited until Simmons had emerged, grave faced, put on his top hat and left. Then she passed on his verdict to Ronnie and the others, Chrissie among them: ‘He says Dan had a stroke. He’ll come back to see him but he doesn’t think he can do anything for him.’

Simmons was right. Daniel was a week in his bed. When he got up from it at the end of that time it was only to shuffle as far as his armchair by the fire where he sat staring blankly into the flames. He was still there, master of the house, and Agatha deferred to him. He could not speak but she would ask him, smiling and nodding, ‘Would you like me to sort out the work for the boys in the yard?’ And he would nod back at her.

Or she shook her head, saying, ‘You don’t want all the family round here all the time while you’re like this, do you?’ And his head would shake in a negative. So the two married sons stayed away.

She consolidated her position as the mistress of the house as the year wore to its close. The days shortened to just a few hours of pale light from a sky sunless and grey above the smoke hanging over the river and the ships. The morning streets glistened with a silver frosting, there were flurries of snow and the horses pulling carts and cabs slid and scrambled and sometimes fell on the treacherous surface, breaking their legs. So the people said as they huddled inside their thin coats, collars pulled up against the biting wind out of the north-east, ‘It’s the poor horses I’m sorry for.’

Chrissie would not complain to outsiders, ‘washing dirty linen in public’, but with the houses crowding cheek by jowl the neighbours sensed or suspected. Mrs  Davis and Mrs  Johnson talked outside the front door of the latter despite the bitter cold. Swathed in shawls against it, they stopped Chrissie one day as she walked by. Mrs  Davis asked, ‘How are you getting on with that Agatha, Chrissie?’

The girl smiled brightly. ‘Oh, very well, thanks.’

Mrs Johnson pressed, ‘Keeps you busy, does she?’

Chrissie fielded that. ‘No more than usual.’

They tried to pump her for some minutes and she answered all their questions with false cheer: ‘Grand! . . . Lovely! . . . Fine!’ Until she broke away.

But that in itself told them something.

As they watched her hurry away, Mrs  Davis said, ‘It’s too good to be true, if you ask me.’

Mrs Johnson nodded, ‘Aye. I reckon the lass is hiding something.’

Chrissie always cooked the midday meal, at Agatha’s snapped orders, while the woman went shopping, though always back in time to serve it. Then two weeks before Christmas Agatha turned from the kitchen range, after the men had been served, to say, ‘I ran a finger along that ledge out in the passage and it came off thick with dust.’

She eyed Chrissie, who blinked at her and protested, ‘I dusted it this morning!’

Agatha ignored that and went on, ‘And the state of that passage! It’s filthy dirty!’

‘I swept it—’

Agatha pointed with a ladle. ‘You’re bone idle!’

‘I’m not! I swept it first thing this morning as well, but it’s where the boys come in with their dirty boots—’

The ladle jabbed the air. ‘You’re a liar! I never saw you.’

‘You were out in the yard!’

And Ronnie put in, ‘That’s right. I saw you out there.’

It was Agatha’s turn to blink, surprised by his intervention. But she replied quickly, ‘I was keeping an eye on
her
because I know I have to.’

Ronnie said doggedly, ‘I saw Chrissie sweeping the passage as well.’

Chrissie shot him a grateful glance, but Agatha let out a bray of laughter. ‘
You
saw her! What do you men know about it? Did you look in the corners? I did. And that’s what I found!’ She dropped the ladle and picked up the small shovel from the hearth, showed it filled with fluff and dirt. Chrissie stared at it, wondering where the dirt had come from.

In fact, Agatha had brought it from the yard. She shoved the pan under Chrissie’s nose and told her, ‘You’re a little liar! All that passage got from you was a lick and a promise.’

Chrissie whispered, ‘I did it properly.’

‘Don’t lie to me! I know you and where you came from!’ And as Chrissie stared at her open mouthed, Agatha jeered, ‘Aha!
That’s
shut you up! You didn’t know
that
. You won’t get away with lying and laziness with me here!’ She watched, that thin smile twisting her lips, as Chrissie ran from the room.

Ronnie pushed back his chair and stood up, accusing her angrily, ‘You’ve made her cry!’

Agatha’s glare was contemptuous. ‘Cry? Never! You don’t know her and her kind like I do. And you can sit down. I’ll deal with her.’ Then bending to nod at Daniel, sitting head-shaking and vague in his armchair before the fire: ‘You want me to deal with Chrissie, don’t you?’

Daniel nodded and Agatha smiled in triumph at Ronnie and the others then followed Chrissie.

She thrust open the door of the little room over the stairs and walked in without knocking. Chrissie lay face down on the narrow bed, weeping. Agatha glared down at her and ordered, ‘You can stop that. It won’t work with me. I told you I know you and where you came from. I wasn’t going to come out with this in front of the men but I’ll tell you now. I tended your mother when you were born. She cursed your father because he’d got her into trouble and ditched her! He was a shipbuilder’s son, with his pockets full o’ money and grabbing owt he wanted. You’re a rich man’s bastard! You’ve got bad blood in you! So don’t think you’re the same as me, or the rest of us here.’

Chrissie was now staring up at her with a mixture of horror and stunned disbelief. Agatha told her, ‘Get your face washed and tidy yourself up.’ She looked down her nose at the cramped little room and added, ‘Then tidy up this place as well. After that you can clean that passage and this time do it out
right
.’

She stalked out and Chrissie was left alone. She wiped her eyes and tried to bring her thoughts into order. A rich man’s bastard? Her father was Harry Carter and he was not a rich man nor was she a bastard. So the charge was a lie. Wasn’t it? But Agatha had been very sure.

She splashed water on her face from the bowl on the dresser, dried it and started to straighten the room, so far as it was needed. The bed was rumpled where she had fallen on it; the thin piece of carpet alongside had been kicked up by Agatha when she burst in; the curtain behind which hung Chrissie’s clothes was open by a few inches. As she twitched these into place she saw her box set behind the curtain and against the wall. Memory stirred. She drew back the curtain again and lifted the lid of the box, delved down into it and found the envelope tucked away beneath her clothes on the bottom of the box. It was still where Bessie Milburn had put it seven years ago.

On the face of the envelope was written, in Bessie’s laboured hand, ‘Chrissie’s birth certificate’. When Bessie had put it away she had said, ‘You can look at that when you’re older.’ Chrissie felt older now.

She opened the envelope and spread out the thick sheet of paper inside. The certificate was for a child named Chrissie Tate. The mother’s name was given as Martha Tate. The date of birth was the same as her own: 13th January, 1894. The space for the name of the father was blank. And pencilled in next to ‘Martha Tate’, in that same big, round hand of Bessie Milburn, was: ‘Her stage name is Vesta Nightingale’.

Chrissie stared at the paper for a long time, at first unable to believe the evidence of her eyes, then slowly accepting it. She finally put the certificate carefully back in its envelope, laid it on the bottom of the box again and covered it with her clothes. As she shut the lid it was like closing a door on part of her life. Then Agatha called shrilly from the passage, ‘Chrissie! Where are you? What are you doing?’

Chrissie answered, ‘I’m coming.’

She cleaned the passage, this time to Agatha’s satisfaction. Agatha was now dressed for the street and told Chrissie, ‘The washing up still needs doing and after that you can bake some fresh bread for the tea then make a start on the ironing. I’ll finish it when I come in. I have to go out for a bit.’ She jerked her head towards Daniel sitting dozing by the fire and said contemptuously, ‘And keep an eye on him. Watch he doesn’t fall out of that chair.’

Chrissie listened dully but now asked, ‘You knew my mother, then?’

‘I looked after her.’

‘Where is she? Is she – dead?’ Because that would be an acceptable explanation.

‘Ha!’ Agatha gave a bark of derisive laughter. ‘She’s alive and kicking, living down in London.’ Then she warned, little eyes narrowing, ‘But don’t you get the idea you can go to her.’ She pulled on her gloves and started down the passage to the front door.

Chrissie followed and asked, ‘Why not?’

Agatha glanced over her shoulder without stopping and said, ‘Because she didn’t want you then and she won’t want to be bothered with you now. That’s why she gave you away to the Carters in the first place!’ Then she had gone and left Chrissie standing in the doorway.

The bread she baked was lumpy and she scorched some of the ironing. The words ran around in her head like the mice that ran around the kitchen when the lights went out at night: ‘You’re a rich man’s bastard. She didn’t want you – gave you away.’

Agatha returned and cursed her, berated her when she dropped a plate as she laid the table for tea when the men were coming in from work. And rasped at her: ‘There’s no good comes of two women in a kitchen. It’s time you earned your keep, my lass.’

Ronnie demanded, ‘What do you mean by that?’

Agatha’s eyes slid towards him. ‘I mean it’s time she had a situation, a place.’

Ronnie warned, ‘If she goes, I go.’

Agatha dismissed that: ‘Don’t be daft!’