Paradise Court (22 page)

‘Would you have me?' he whispered.

She nodded. ‘If things were different, yes.' Her voice was full of longing.

‘Will you have me as it is?'

Her heart jumped at the directness of the question. How many women said ‘yes' on the spur of despair? ‘No, Billy, how can I?'

He let his hand drop to his side. ‘Like I said, I ain't got no right.'

The caretaker trawled the building for people left gossiping in classrooms. His footsteps approached the coffee room.

‘But we'll be friends,' Frances said hurriedly, with no experience of the torment involved.

He nodded. ‘We'll try.' He had a better idea of the misery in store behind that harmless phrase.

She gathered herself and went out into the hallway before him. The caretaker shuffled towards them, ushered them out and locked the door against them.

Billy walked Frances to the corner of Duke Street as usual. When they parted, exhaustion overtook her. She arrived home at last and met Duke toiling his way up from the cellar, preparing to close down the empty bar. Her father looked at her strained, tragic face and held his arms wide. She sobbed silently against his chest, before they went upstairs to join the others. They sat together until long after midnight, missing Ernie and Robert, dreading the start of the trial.

As the winds blew through the trees in Hyde Park and tore off their golden leaves, the Parsons family hoped and prayed for a new lead that would clear Ernie. October turned into November.
‘A miracle's what we need,' Florrie confided to Dolly Ogden.
‘Or for Ernie to remember what did happen that night,' Annie put in.
‘Exactly, a bleeding miracle,' Florrie insisted. She shook her head and went on wiping glasses at the bar. ‘He always clams up when he gets into a state about something. Always has. You can't get a word out of him. Duke reckons he just blocks things out, as if they ain't never happened.' She was ‘worrying herself to a shadow over him', as she told Tom on the telephone.

But Paradise Court as a whole had other events to consider. Tommy turned up one night out of the blue. It was the 5th of November. He strolled down the court, his new jacket collar turned up against the cold wind, whistling and poking his way into the alley at the back of the Duke, where he caught Charlie Ogden in a clinch with Sadie Parsons. He rattled a dustbin lid and watched them spring apart. ‘Ooh, someone's clicked!' he crowed, ready to move swiftly on.

Charlie had been busily impressing his girlfriend with his mastery of the screen kiss. He'd studied it in detail from the projection room at the Gem; you had to draw the girl towards you by the waist, so she leaned her face back, then you craned towards her with heavy-lidded eyes and put your mouth firmly against hers, gently forcing her lips apart. It worked like a dream until Tommy
O'Hagan came and interrupted them. ‘Bleeding hell, Tommy!' he called out, dragging Sadie with him out into the court.

Tommy turned with a cheeky grin, relaxed and unconcerned, as if he'd just taken a stroll down the park before tea. He had more flesh on his bones and shoes on his feet, besides the new jacket. This one didn't skim his backside and fail to fasten across the chest like the other. An optimistic streak must have told him that he'd grow into this one eventually, since he was filling out nicely and losing the peaky look of the Barnardo's posters. ‘Now then, Charlie, is that what they teach you at school nowadays? “Bleeding this and bleeding that”!'

Charlie approached him warily. ‘Where you been, Tommy?'

‘Here and there. Why, did you miss me, then?' Tommy glanced ahead towards the grim tenements. ‘Blimey, the old place still looks horrible as ever, don't it?'

Sadie clutched Charlie's hand. ‘Ain't you heard, Tommy?'

‘Where I been I ain't heard nothing, believe me.' Tommy had taken it into his head to go downriver and look for a ship. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision; things couldn't be worse at sea than they were at home, he reckoned. He met up with a Norwegian captain and persuaded him to take him on as dogsbody on his fishing boat. They set sail straight away. After five days of throwing up and staggering about the place like a lunatic, he'd found his sea legs. In no time, the oily smell of fish had crept into every pore. All day he cleaned each cog and wheel of the old boat's engine with filthy rags, and all night they would chug and grind in his dreams. But the food made up for the grimy work, even though everything tasted of engine oil. There was plenty of it at any rate. One short voyage was enough, however, so Tommy inherited the first mate's jacket during a drunken brawl on their first night ashore, then he hightailed it back upriver.

With money in his pocket and a determination to make a success of himself before he headed home to Paradise Court, he turned his hand to wheeling and dealing on dry land. He set his sights on a barrow and a pitch outside Waterloo, his old hunting ground. So he befriended a feeble old-timer who had a fruit stall and persuaded
him he'd be better off with his feet up by the fire as winter drew on. He offered him cash, of course. The old codger snatched his hand off.

Now Tommy was part of the early morning scene at Covent Garden, and all day you could hear his raucous shout between the great main archway of Waterloo Station. This evening he'd come home to show off.

He turned to Charlie. ‘Why's she got a face on her? Ain't she pleased to see me?'

‘Pleased as punch, Tommy,' Charlie faltered. He and Sadie fell into step beside him. ‘You going straight on home?'

‘Looks like it.'

Sadie tugged at Charlie's sleeve. ‘Leave him be, Charlie!'

They halted, and Tommy headed on without breaking his stride. They heard him whistle a romantic tune and saw the derision of the unattached and fancy free in his swaggering walk. ‘Blimey!' Charlie shook his head. ‘He ain't half in for a shock.'

It made Sadie cry all over again, to imagine Mary's haggard face as she told Tommy the news about Daisy. Charlie's hug contained nothing of the screen hero this time; he was finding it hard to hold back tears himself.

Maurice Leigh had also done some hard thinking since his golden walk in Hyde Park with Jess. In the cool light of day, the problems of being involved with a woman who had a kid in tow shone clear and sharp. He summed them up in the dreaded word, ‘ties'.

For Maurice this wasn't the callow reaction of irresponsible youth. At eighteen or nineteen, perhaps, being tied down went against a natural spirit of fun and denied the opportunity all young men needed to play the field. But he was now in his late twenties, smart and successful, and outwardly in a position where a man might want to settle down with wife and family. However, life had made him wary of such a move. His Jewish background, strict and claustrophobic when his father was alive, had invited bad name-calling at school and turned him into a poor attender. There was a particular hatred of Eastern European immigrant Jews, to
which group Maurice's family belonged. They survived in small, isolated pockets in areas like Bethnal Green, and he recalled all too well the heavy sentimentality of family ties and the strict moralizing which held him almost in chains and apart from other boys.

Since the work in the book-binding shop kept the family hovering only just above the desperate poverty of the homeless and jobless who roamed the East End streets at the turn of the century, Maurice quickly learned to suspect the value of his closed community. His father worked for an uncle who ran the small business; his mother's brother. He paid the men a pittance to make them stoop all week over glue and leather, doling out gold leaf for the page edging with miserly caution. His meanness eventually cast the fatherless family on to the street; he needed the garret to provide lodgings for his new employee, he said. Maurice's mother begged for Marcus, Maurice's oldest brother, to be taken on in his dead father's place, but the uncle refused to consider it. So much for family loyalty. The brothers lived on their wits to support themselves and their mother in a series of run-down rooms until she too died of tuberculosis when Maurice was just fourteen. Then he was alone and free.

Working to survive, he primed street-lamps, got birched so regularly at his industrial school for hopping the wag that he soon gave up going altogether, and eventually fell in with Monty Phillips, the pawnbroker who also ran a stall selling secondhand clothes on the railings down the rag fair. From here life took off. Decently dressed in other boys' clothes, he used his spare time to gamble over cigarette cards or to pinch a bicycle for a day to ride out into the countryside, when he showed off his athleticism by storming ahead up the hills and freewheeling down the other side, hands in pockets. Ditching the bike back with its owner, he would buy a fish supper and retire to bed under the counter at Monty's. No complications. No ties.

From this start, he'd moved on through a mixture of opportunism and hard work into his present respectable job. He was still convinced that his motto held good. What did he want with a
woman and a child? The difficulty was, this wasn't just any woman. This was Jess.

He was annoyed with himself for prolonging the unfamiliar state of indecision, which had now lasted more than a month. He and Jess danced around each other whenever they met, half longing, half afraid. He took her out once or twice a week, and at times the passion was intense. But the relationship seemed to have stalled. She felt she didn't want Maurice to see Grace; the commitment would be too great. And she worried about Ernie. For his part, Maurice worked hard at the picture palace and bided his time.

On the day after Tommy O'Hagan turned up in the court, he decided to shelve these things and go to join a session at Milo's gym. It was the nearest place to Paradise Court for a good, strenuous training bout. He was as quick with his fists as with his brain, and straight away impressed regulars, including Walter Davidson, with his clean punching and neat footwork. Maurice had finished his work-out and stood chatting with Walter and Milo himself, when Chalky White approached to introduce himself.

They shook hands. ‘Nice piece of work,' Chalky said. He stood, arms akimbo, clutching the ends of a towel which was slung like a scarf around his neck. His own singlet was damp from a work-out on the weights.

Maurice immediately resented the condescending tone. In the code he had been attuned to all his life, ‘Nice piece of work' signalled, ‘This is my turf'. It was an unasked for seal of approval from the gangland boss. Maurice felt he didn't need it, so he nodded once and kept quiet.

Chalky pumped him for information on where he lived, where he d come from, what he did It didn't take him long to work out the Jewish connection, and this put an extra edge of superiority into his conversation. ‘Maybe I'll bring my girl down your place this Saturday,' he told him, as if bestowing a favour. He'd found a replacement for Daisy in yet another girl from the chorus line at the Palace, but he didn't usually meet up with her until late at night. So he also went out to pick up a casual girl earlier in the evening, in a pub or at a dance, and he and his mates would parade
the streets, girls in tow. Meeting up with Maurice gave him the chance to angle for free tickets to the Gem; one of the up-and-coming places to be seen.

‘It'd be nice to see you there,' was Maurice's noncommittal reply. He kept his eyes on the pair who'd just stepped into the ring and begun to spar.

‘Reckon I might put a bit of business your way,' Chalky boasted. He'd already taken against Maurice as a tight-arse.

‘Fine.'

‘Me and my mates, Syd and Whitey up there.' He pointed to the two boxers.

Not so tough, Maurice thought, casting a critical eye. Neither would last two minutes in the ring with him. If Chalky was only as good as these two at handling himself, there was not much to worry about. ‘Best come early and miss the queues,' he advised. ‘The place gets packed out and I have to turn people away these days.'

Chalky rubbed the towel across his face. Jumped up tight-arse, he repeated to himself. Leigh had just made a bad move, treating him like a nobody. Chalky would show him different as soon as he got the chance. He spat a ball of phlegm on to the floor and strode off.

Milo, still standing nearby, pulled a face at Maurice and went about his business. ‘Bad move,' Walter said later when Maurice went to the changing room to put on his outdoor clothes.

‘I ain't bothered.' Maurice combed his hair in the speckled, steamy mirror. ‘I can deal with his type no trouble.'

In this reckless mood he went straight up to the Duke to invite Jess to a dance that Friday night at the Town Hall. ‘I'll get time off,' he told her. She looked doubtful, glass and tea-towel in hand Duke kept an eye on her from the cellar steps.
‘Oh, I don't know. I ain't been to a dance in ages. I've forgotten how.'
‘All the better. That means I can teach you; the Tango, the Turkey Trot!' He looked animated. ‘Go on, Jess, say you'll come!'

In the end she nodded. ‘I'll see if I can.'

‘This Friday, eight on the dot. Make a date!' He drank up, chatted amiably with Arthur and Dolly at a table by the door, then went on his way in high spirits. ‘Babe! Come along! O, kid! O, kad!' He hummed the latest American dance. ‘Hug ‘em. Hug ‘em. Put your arms around me, Babe!'

In the bar, Florrie warned Duke not to be a misery. ‘The girl needs some fun, just like everyone else.'

Duke concentrated on tapping the new barrel. ‘I ain't said nothing.'

‘You don't have to, your face says it all. You'll put her off going if you go round looking like that.'

He sighed. ‘I ain't exactly feeling on top of the world, Flo.'

‘Same as the rest of us, Wilf. It ain't no better for Jess. And she's doing her best for Ern. In fact, she's more than pulling her weight if you ask me, getting the sewing off the ground with Ett. She's a good girl if you did but know it.'

Duke grunted. ‘But do you think he knows about . . . you know?' He tilted his head sideways, glancing up through the cellar ceiling. ‘He ain't in for a shock when he finds out, is he?'

Florrie tutted and shoved him to one side while she turned on the tap and let beer froth into her jug. ‘No, she told him about Grace weeks since. He took it well, she says.'

‘It makes me mad!' He went behind the gantry and put his shoulder to a second barrel, wedging the chock up a notch with angry force.

Florrie stepped back in surprise. ‘Steady on. What got into you?'

‘I'm just thinking of him what done this to her. I tell you, if I could get my hands on him, I'd throttle him!'

‘Yes, and you won't even let on to your one and only sister who it was, and that's a fact!' Florrie stood, arms crossed.

He shook his head. ‘No. Frances said not to. They don't want no one poking their noses in.'

‘Including me.' Florrie sniffed and folded her arms, doing her best to assume a wounded look. ‘It ain't for want of asking, Duke Parsons!' In fact, she'd nagged them to death to get at the truth.

‘Jess says it ain't important no more.' He clenched his teeth and hammered at the chock with the edge of his massive fist.