Paradise Lane (22 page)

Maureen Mason was a disappointed woman. She had come back from Ireland to find that Tom Goodfellow had returned only fleetingly from Hampshire. And now, Rosie Blunt was sitting here in the front room of number 3 with the truth tripping lightly from her tongue. ‘He’s some sort of a lord. Ivy told me in a letter. Great big house, he’s got, servants too. His dad died, you see, so Tom’s inherited this Goodfellow Hall and a load of farms.’

‘Well, it was nice of him to give Sally and Ivy a holiday,’ said Maureen, working hard to keep the sadness from her voice.

‘Ivy says he’s selling up and coming back.’

Maureen’s eyebrows stopped short of hitting the ceiling, but only just. ‘To Bolton?’ Surely any man would choose to live the grand life instead of returning to an industrial town? ‘Why isn’t he staying where he rightly belongs, Rosie?’

The little old lady shook her head. ‘Summat to do with his dad, Ivy thinks. Like a family feud of some sort – you know how they go on, these gentry. If you go and marry trade, or bring any disgrace, you’re out on the lug-ole before you can say suit of armour. Any road, I shall have to go back to Ollie, ’cos he’s gone all peculiar.’

Maureen, who had always found Ollie a bit strange, didn’t know what to say. The man had been going on about green fingers and rotted vegetable matter for years, had always struck most people as odd when he theorized on the subject of gardening.

‘He can hardly remember his own name,’ said Rosie. ‘And he keeps wandering off like a kiddy. I could put him on reins, I suppose. But it’s getting hard, Maureen. He’s not clean any more. I have to keep changing him and making him sit on the lav. We’d no children, and now he’s becoming a child.’

Maureen put her arms around the dear lady. ‘If there’s anything you want me to do, any help you need, just come and get me. If I’m down at the shop, Mr Heilberg will understand should I close for the odd half-hour.’

Rosie sniffed. ‘I’m frightened, Maureen.’

‘Will I stay at your house, then? Will I move in till things get sorted?’

The wrinkled face brightened. ‘Would you really do that for me, lass?’

‘I would and I will.’

The two women clung together for a few moments, then Rosie extracted herself from the embrace and went back to Ollie. Maureen sank into a chair, looked round the room at all her half-mended treasures. Tom would have real treasures, she supposed, ornaments that would make her shepherd and sheepdog look like plaster prizes from the fair.

She was restless, missed the sound of Tom’s pigeons, the noises he made when rattling his fire to life. ‘I can’t just sit here,’ she told herself. ‘I must pull myself together and find my toothbrush, go up to Rosie’s for the night.’ But she didn’t want to do that, not just yet. She needed a bit of thinking time, yet she wanted to be on the move. Also, she must get her mind off Tom Goodfellow, must force herself to look elsewhere for a husband. There had been one or two possibilities in Ireland, but Tom had been a hard act to follow. Oh, she should occupy herself, find something to do.

The answer came. Yes, that was it. She would go down to the shop and see if Ruth Heilberg had bought anything interesting. The sky was darkening towards night, but she would go all the same. She was always like this after a few weeks in Ireland, restless, raring to get back into the swing.

With her coat over her arm, she walked along Paradise Lane and turned left into Spencer Street, carried on to the bottom until she met Wigan Road. She passed the butcher’s and the greengrocery, unlocked the gate, let herself into the shop doorway. The three brass orbs that advertised Heilberg’s wanted polishing. Tomorrow, she would root out the metal wadding and a stepladder. With the door locked behind her, Maureen peered into the gloom.

She thought about lighting the mantles, decided against it. The last time she had been down here in the evening several people had knocked at the door. ‘You open, love? Only I want to pawn me coat and me husband’s best shoes afore he gets back from the Wheatsheaf,’ and so on. So she remained in the meagre light of dusk, examined things by carrying them to the window.

Next to the wooden cash box was a chair where Maureen was supposed to sit between customers. It was seldom used, because this active lady preferred to spend her time drifting about among purchases. She never investigated pledges unless they were out of date, but items that had been sold to the shop formed the basis of Maureen’s motley collection of ‘mended’ memorabilia. She found some lead soldiers, wondered about welding, decided it was beyond her. But there was a beautiful china doll in Victorian dress, its face scarred only by a missing nose. The dolls’ hospital would have a nose, she felt sure. So she placed the doll in a box with a statue of St Theresa who had lost a hand. Would the dolls’ hospital do a saint’s hand? she wondered.

There were some old books, too, including a family bible dating back to 1840 and a leather-bound missal. She peered at these, decided to leave them till morning. Then, as she placed these below the counter, a flash of light illuminated the room. For a split second, she saw a face behind the light, then she sank to the floor under a pile of merchandise that was falling from burning shelves.

In the store room, Bert Simpson seemed riveted to the spot. He had entered by a small window, had made the bomb out of a pale ale bottle, some rag and half a pint of paraffin. The last twenty-two hours had been terrifying, and he should have been glad that the ordeal was over. But if this woman burned to death, he would be a murderer. In one short day, he had possibly gone from petty opportunist to arsonist to killer. Worthington had insisted that the shop would be empty. The fire was raging – he could smell burning paint. What could he do?

Galvanized by fear, he fled from the scene, his short, fat legs pumping as he raced to the Parry Rec. Once there, he gathered his breath near the railings, waited until his heart had slowed. Then he forced himself to saunter along Worthington Street towards a public house on Derby Road. Once inside the pub’s back yard, he visited the gents’, made sure that no sign of his crime showed, rinsed off the smell of paraffin at a tap in a corner.

He went to the bar, grinned half-heartedly at his comrades in drink.

‘You were gone a long while,’ remarked one.

Bert picked up his glass of flat beer, tried to still his trembling hand. ‘Me stomach’s playing up,’ he said. ‘I went for a breath of air.’

‘Aye, and you look as if you’ve used all the toilet paper and all.’

Everyone laughed at the feeble quip, though Bert’s smile was at half-mast. All he could see was that woman’s face. By now, she could be scorched to a crisp.

‘I’m coming with you.’ Ivy stood in the middle of a country lane, arms akimbo, black skirt sweeping the floor. ‘There’s no road I’m letting you go piking back to Bolton on your own.’

Tom breathed in deeply, prayed for patience. ‘Sally is settled in the village school. Just let her carry on until the end of term—’

‘That’s still a month away from now. Joseph and Ruth Heilberg have lost one of their shops, so I want to talk to them. Maureen’s my friend and all, you know. If she’s in hospital, I’d like to go and see her. And it looks like arson, doesn’t it?’

Tom, who had his own opinion in the matter, shook his head, turned on the spot, allowed his eyes to scan the fields. Looking at the land he owned never pleased him. He didn’t want these farms, these complications. He wanted to go home . . . yes, home and he wanted to . . .

He swallowed, allowed the thought to return. He wanted to make sure that Maureen was going to improve. Because he loved her and hoped to marry her. As long as she wanted no children, that was. In spite of the summer heat, he shivered at the memory of a brother he had tried to love until another summer many years ago. A Goodfellow child could be a curse, another Jonathan.

Tom dragged himself back to the here and now, knew he would have to say something to Ivy. Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound. ‘I want to go alone,’ he insisted, his back turned on Ivy. ‘I need to see her.’

‘So do I. And Ollie and Rosie. Who’s helping Rosie now with Maureen in hospital? Eh? Go on, your clever lordship, and answer me that one.’

He swivelled on the spot and faced the difficult old woman. ‘You are a difficult old woman,’ he informed her. ‘Look, Ivy, I am going to propose to Maureen.’

She took a step back, waited until her breathing returned to normal. Then a thought struck. ‘What if she doesn’t look the same? What if she’s scarred?’

Tom smiled. ‘Then we must try to mend her, just as she has tried to mend so many broken things.’ Just as he and others had tried to mend the broken bodies and souls of countless airmen after the Battle of Britain . . .

‘She never managed to do it proper.’ Ivy smiled sadly. ‘There’s more glue on her carpet than on her broken ornaments.’

‘Well, I shall manage. I am very good with glue.’

Ivy’s grin disappeared as quickly as sunlight in a storm. ‘And then there’s Rosie. Ollie’s halfway to Manchester in the brain department, absent without bloody leave, poor soul. Rosie Blunt needs me—’

‘Sally needs you.’

Ivy grunted, stepped behind the gate of Rose Cottage, closed it. ‘Then you mun fetch Rosie and Ollie here, Tom. If he’s going to be confused, he might as well be confused in fresh air.’ She left a small pause. ‘Is it a deal? After all, yon house is called Rose Cottage.’ She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. ‘So Rosemary Blunt should be here by rights. Me and our Sal can go in the back bedroom, then the Blunts can have the front.’

‘Fine.’ He turned as if to leave.

‘Hold your horses,’ she ordered. ‘I want a word with you, lad.’

He crept like a reluctant schoolboy and stood near the gate. ‘Yes, miss?’

‘Why did you never ask her before? She’s been after you for nigh on twelve month, but you said nowt.’

He stared steadily into eyes that were frighteningly intelligent and alert. ‘Because she knows now.’

‘Knows what?’

‘That I’m landed gentry.’

‘And what’s that got to do with the price of fish? I mean, we’ve all had our thoughts about you, Tom Goodfellow. She knew you weren’t normal. We all knew as how you weren’t blinking normal, come to that. So what’s changed?’

He shrugged. ‘If she’s interested in me now, while I’m a lord, before I’ve offloaded the title, then that proves something.’

Ivy stared ahead for a few seconds. ‘Aye, and if her bonny face is burnt and you still want her, then that’ll be true love and all.’ She perked up, beamed at him again. ‘And then, you can buy me a frock and a hat for the wedding. Lilac, remember. I’ll get feisty in lilac, so warn all the old fellows.’

He leaned over the gate and kissed the lovely lady whose face reflected her thoughts and feelings like a barometer. ‘I miss Derek,’ he muttered, his tone thickened by emotion. ‘He was a good man, because you made him so.’

‘Stop mauling about,’ she laughed, pushing him away. ‘Else it’s me you’ll be dragging up the aisle, not poor Maureen. Eeh, I do hope she’s all right.’ She wiped a rheumy tear from the corner of an eye, told herself she’d stopped crying for Derek.

‘The reports are encouraging,’ he said. ‘The smoke made her ill, and there are some minor burns to her hands. They said nothing about the rest of her. Did you know she saved a doll and a statue of a saint? She told the ambulance driver to take them to the dolls’ hospital. And he did, on his day off.’

‘She’s fey,’ pronounced Ivy. ‘Like a lot of Irish, she’s got what you might call an imagination, plus a sixth sense. A good lass, is Maureen Mason.’

Tom studied his shoes for a while, then raised his head and looked hard at Ivy. ‘Do you think it was Worthington? The fire, I mean.’

Her lip curled. ‘I’d put nowt past him. If he’d been around at the time, I’d have blamed him instead of Guy flaming Fawkes and all his merry men. Eeh, I don’t know, Tom, and that’s a fact. Rosie sent that lad down the hospital – him with the funny hair.’

‘Red Trubshaw?’

‘Aye, that’s the one. Ugly little so-and-so, but good at heart. And Maureen told him the same as she’d told the bobbies – she saw a white face with shocked eyes, then after that she remembered nowt else till she came to proper in the ambulance. Any road, Andrew Worthington wouldn’t do his own dirty work. Oh no, he’d have some other daft bugger acting as mop rag.’

Tom stepped aside to allow a cow to pass by. The herdsman came round the corner with the rest of the beasts, tipped his hat at Tom and Ivy. ‘Hello, Master Tom, Messus Ivy,’ he said, a grin displaying many gaps between teeth.

‘That’s as near as I can get,’ complained Tom when the cattle had moved on. ‘They’ve dropped the “M’lord”, but they can’t call me by just my Christian name.’

Ivy laughed at him. ‘How’s it going, then? Are you still selling land off?’

‘No.’ He straightened, peered at the sky to assess the time. Time hadn’t mattered till lately, so he’d lost the habit of wearing a watch. He’d had plenty of time to study and see to his birds in Bolton. ‘I must go to Africa.’

He didn’t make sense all the time, thought Ivy. That was happen something to do with all the inbreeding that had gone on in the upper classes. ‘I thought you were bound for Bolton?’

‘I am. I’ll go to Africa later on, at the end of the year. My sister must be found, you see. If she has married and borne a child, she may want him to take over here. And she should be given some compensation for having lived with Father. So I’m not disposing of anything more until I’ve talked to Patricia.’

‘It’s all yours in the will, isn’t it?’

‘Legally, yes. Morally – well, we’ll see. So I’ll bid you good evening, Mrs Crumpsall. When I’ve separated Sally from Gus and the pigeons, I’ll send her home.’

Ivy stood at the gate of the little house that was now the property of her granddaughter. She watched Tom as he walked away, dejection showing in the slope of his shoulders. He was using that brass-headed cane again, she noticed. His heart must be aching all the way down to his mended knee. The poor man didn’t want to be here. After twenty-odd years’ absence from Goodfellow Hall, he valued his freedom above all else.