Mary's Child (21 page)

Millie chuckled, ‘True enough. Lord knows how we’d manage if we ever filled the place. But that’s not likely.’ She went on, ‘When Joe sent me round to the Frigate on an errand the other night your back room was full o’ young toffs.’

Chrissie nodded. ‘Oh, aye. They’re regulars. Get up to some daft tricks but they’re good lads really.’

‘Wasn’t one o’ them that Jack Ballantyne? Tall, good-looking lad.’

Chrissie answered, carefully casual, ‘Probably. He gets in.’

‘There’s many a lass fancies him. And he’s been out with a few.’ That was common knowledge. Millie teased, ‘You might be next on the list. Mebbe that’s why he keeps looking in.’

‘No, I won’t!’ Chrissie was indignant and turned red. ‘He’s no different to the others as far as I’m concerned.’ That was said with force; she meant it.

Millie touched her hand. ‘I was just joking. Sorry.’

‘That’s all right.’ Chrissie tried to shrug off her embarrassment, but she was glad when the door behind her opened.

An old woman came in and said, ‘Give us a bottle o’ stout, Millie, lass.’ She peered at the two girls as Millie poured the drink into a glass and asked, ‘Heard the news, have you?’

Millie set the glass on the counter. ‘What was that?’

A hand, brown and lumpy with arthritis, put two pennies on the counter then curled around the glass. ‘They hung that Dr  Crippen this morning.’

Millie’s eyes widened. ‘Oh!’

Chrissie shuddered.

The old woman sucked at the Guinness, sighed and sat down at one of the little tables, glass in her hand. ‘Serves him right, I say. Murdering his missus like that and cutting her up. Deserves all he got.’

Millie said, ‘It was marvellous how he was caught, him halfway to Canada when they sent a message by the wireless to the ship he was on and he was arrested.’

The old woman agreed: ‘Ah! But, mind you, I don’t like that wireless. It’s not natural. Like them picture shows they have these days, not natural like the variety on the halls. There’ll be no good come of it.’ She sucked in the thick, black stout.

Chrissie said, ‘I have to be going.’

She hurried back to the Frigate, trying to push from her mind the thought of the body jerking at the end of the rope. Instead she wondered why the Bells did not have more trade.

When she arrived, the brewers’ dray stood outside the Frigate, a big steam-powered lorry stacked with barrels and crates, with a tray hung under the engine to catch the grey and glowing ash from the fire. Chrissie preferred the drays pulled by horses, loved the big gentle shires with their soft noses.

She was back in time to cook the midday meal and to heat up the pies for the bar. She slid them, piping hot, on to hot plates on the stroke of twelve and carried them downstairs to the bar on a tray. Five minutes later the bar filled up with men pouring out from the yards, and ten minutes later all the pies had gone.

That was another of Chrissie’s ventures. She had persuaded Lance Morgan: ‘Let me make some bacon sandwiches of a morning for you to sell in the bar. And if they go, you pay me something for every dozen.’ And later: ‘All these chaps who come in at dinnertime, they want a pint to wash down the sandwiches they’ve brought with them. But suppose you had some hot pies, wouldn’t they go like the sandwiches once people got to know they were there?’ And he paid her for her work at the oven.

Lance Morgan had been as good as his word, paying her the thirty shillings a month he had promised if she could do the job. Since then he had told Florence, marvelling, ‘I’m paying her nearly that much again for what she cooks for the bar,’ adding, ‘
and
I’m making a profit at it.’

Chrissie knew that, knew to a penny how profitable his business was and respected him for his ability. Now, as she set the table for dinner, she reflected, smiling, that he might not have a lot of imagination but he ran a good house, as Frank had told her, clean, comfortable and honest. It was popular not only with the men who worked in the yards, but with some of the clerks and young professionals of the town, like Luke Arkenstall, the son of Ezra and now training to be a solicitor like his father. And Jack Ballantyne. Her smile faded.

After dinner the children were put to bed for a nap. Florence and Lance dozed in chairs before the fire while Chrissie curled up in her little room. The break was welcome; she had been at work since before the dawn. She woke later and went back to the kitchen where she found Florence engrossed in her embroidery.

Arkley had said Florence was ‘a dab hand’, and Chrissie had found this to be true. Florence had a gift for working with a needle or a sewing machine, could embroider a picture or make a dress or a shirt. Chrissie had sat at her feet to learn her skills. Now she leaned on the back of Florence’s chair for a moment to watch the quick fingers, the darting needle. But then Reginald yelled and she went to see to him, to dress him and his sister and take them to the park for their afternoon walk.

Later she baked more pies and the evening found her in the bar. Arkley had gone home, finished for the day. In his place was Billy Bennett, short and bald, fat and grinning. Nowadays Lance Morgan spent most of his evenings upstairs with his family while Billy and Chrissie looked after the customers in the bar and the sitting-room between them.

‘Hello, Ted!’ She greeted him happily, glancing into the bar as she passed.

‘Evening, Chrissie!’ Ted Ward answered shyly. He usually came from the regimental depot at Newcastle on a Saturday or Sunday, sometimes during the week, as now, though rarely. In the evening there was barely enough time for the trip from Newcastle, after falling out from his duties, and returning to barracks before ‘lights out’. He had grown into a strapping young man of close to six feet, standing an inch or two taller than most of the men in the bar. He was a handsome young man, too, who doted on Chrissie, but from a distance. He stood at the bar, smart in his red tunic, and drank his beer slowly, making it last. On a Sunday when he was not on duty, and Chrissie had an hour or two off, he would take her for a stroll in the park. He had yet to kiss her.

She heard regularly from his brother Frank. He wrote every week, at first from the training ship and later from the cruiser to which he was drafted. They were brief letters written on one side of a sheet of paper in copperplate but laboured prose, all starting: ‘Dear Chrissie Carter, just a few lines to let you know  . . .’ and ending: ‘Hoping this finds you as it leaves me, in the pink.’ In between he told her something of his life, though the account was so loaded with naval slang and terminology she only understood half of it. But she replied to them all, and kept them, praying that he was happy.

Chrissie surreptitiously squeezed Ted’s hand as she paused to glance quickly around the room. She had not been afraid to serve behind the bar because she had been brought up among working men like these. Now she noted the regulars, knowing them all – the jokers, the serious, the friendly and the potentially violent. She had learned how to deal with all of them. Then there were the strangers. A pub like the Frigate, close to the river, always had some seamen off the ships. And sometimes there were others. There was one tonight.

Chrissie sidled along to tubby Billy Bennett and murmured, ‘The young feller in the corner – I haven’t seen him before.’

Billy looked over at the group sitting round a table, the stranger among them. He was in his late teens, tall and thickset, with a thin moustache on a narrow, raffishly handsome face. The eyes were insolent and did not stay still. He was flashily dressed in an overcoat with a velvet collar and carried a cane.

Billy said, ‘Imitation toff. I don’t know him. But we know the ones he’s with.’ The rest of the group were rowdies, petty criminals, almost amateurs. They stole what they could pick up easily. ‘We’d better keep an eye on him.’

‘Still at it, Jack?’ Richard Ballantyne smiled at his son and blinked tired eyes. Most of the lights in the offices were out. The yard itself lay silent and empty but for the old nightwatchman. A solitary light still burned in the office used by Jack, where he sat at a desk covered in plans and sheets of figures.

Jack ran long fingers through his already rumpled black thatch and answered his father, ‘I’ll give it a bit longer. Chivers talked me through the ship so far as she’s built.’ Chivers was the chief draughtsman. ‘I just want to make sure I’ve got it clear in my mind.’

Richard pulled his watch from his waistcoat pocket, flipped open the case and peered at the dial. ‘Dinner will be at eight. That only gives you half an hour. Shall I send Benson back for you?’ Benson was the chauffeur, waiting patiently in the car outside the offices. Richard had bought the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost a year ago.

Jack shook his head, ‘No, thanks. I won’t be home in time for dinner. Ask Cook to leave something out for me for later. But I might stop for a bite when I leave here.’

His father nodded acquiescence, but warned, ‘Don’t overdo it.’

‘I won’t.’

Jack watched his father stride from the office, shrugging into his overcoat, and thought with affection, You’re a fine one to talk, Dad. Richard Ballantyne devoted his life to his work. When he was not working a twelve-hour day in the yard, he was travelling the world in search of orders to keep the yard and the men at work. Over the years he and Jack had become even closer. They walked, talked and now worked together.

Richard would go off to Newcastle or York at weekends, two or three times a month, on ‘business’. Jack did not know about Sally Youill, Richard’s mistress, but he was not a fool and for a year or more had suspected the nature of that ‘business’. At first he had been shocked but slowly he decided that so long as his father was happy it was no one’s concern but his.

Jack bent to his own task again. He had finished with school in the summer, turned down the chance to study at a university and chosen instead to go straight into the yard. He was no stranger to its workings; his grandfather, George Ballantyne, had taken him around the yard almost from the time he could walk. Now he had started to cement that knowledge by working in every department of the shipyard from drawing-office to fitting out.

He had spent the morning crawling about the bowels of the ship outside on the stocks. At noon he had shed the overalls he had worn for that and donned the suit he now wore to join old Chivers in the drawing-office. The jacket was hung on the back of his chair and he worked with his shirtsleeves rolled up, showing muscular forearms. His hands were big, long-fingered and broad, seeming more suited to the manual work he had laboured at on the ship, than holding a pencil. But he was just as sure in his handling of the plans and papers.

He worked on, not taking any account of time, until he sat back, satisfied that he had learned his lesson. Only then did he stretch long arms and let his eyes switch to the clock on the wall of the drawing-office. He stood up and put away the plans and papers, lifted his jacket from the back of the chair and pulled it on. Well tailored, it settled smoothly across his wide shoulders.

He switched out the light – they had electricity in the offices now – picked up his overcoat and walked out of the yard. He paused a moment to stare up at the pile of the ship on the stocks between the overhanging cranes, all standing black against the night sky. Then he walked on, content.

The nightwatchman at the gate called, ‘G’neet, Mr  Ballantyne!’

‘’Night, Fred!’ Jack walked up the bank from the yard, through the narrow streets of little houses that crowded round it. The night was clear but cold, stars prickling a windswept sky. Late as it was, there were still a lot of children playing in the streets. He passed a game of marbles, the cluster of boys not noticing him, intent on the two who were playing. A group of girls chattered among themselves under a lamp, involved in a makebelieve world of ‘houses’ chalked on the pavement.

Inside five minutes he passed half a dozen pubs but they were not for him. Then he came to the Frigate, standing on the corner, and he shoved open the door, walked along the passage and into the sitting-room. The hissing gaslights around the walls reflected from the polished wooden panelling below them, and from the big mirror over the fireplace. The usual crowd of young men, Luke Arkenstall among them, sat or stood around the fire. They were all sons of middle-class families – bank clerks or training to be solicitors, accountants, doctors or dentists. One crouched by the fender. He had cleaned off the shovel and was using it as a pan to cook sausages and kippers.

They greeted him cheerfully. ‘Hello, Jack!’ ‘Come on in!’ ‘What’ll you have?’ That last invitation came from Luke Arkenstall, slim, serious at his work but grinning now, straight and not yet with his father’s stoop.

‘Thanks, I’ll have a scotch.’ Jack’s eyes were already on the door to the bar.

Chrissie Carter entered and Luke called, ‘Let’s have a scotch for Jack, Chrissie, please.’

‘Right, Mr  Arkenstall,’ and she went to fetch it.

Jack thought that he, like the others, came here because they enjoyed each other’s company and the laughter. But there was also the girl, Chrissie Carter, with her tiny waist, huge, sparkling eyes and wide mouth. She was long-legged though not tall, quick and nimble, laughing or solemn. Jack admitted to himself that he came here to see Chrissie.

She returned with the glass of whisky and a jug of water on a tray, set them on a table beside Jack and took the money from Luke. Chrissie stared at the impromptu cook crouching by the fire, the sausages and kippers sizzling on his shovel. She laughed and shook her head, telling them cheerfully, ‘You’re mad, all of you.’