That'll Be the Day (2007) (39 page)

‘At least let me see them. I do have rights as their mother and
they
need to
see
me.’ Judy felt close to despair, almost on the brink of hysteria.

Not being able to even see her children was having a terribly debilitating effect upon her. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t concentrate, could do no more than pick at her food when she remembered to eat at all. All she’d found by way of employment was dishing out bacon butties in a snack bar. Judy knew she should be applying for jobs with better prospects, or signing herself on to a training scheme for typing or book-keeping, but couldn’t seem to motivate herself to do so, perhaps fearing that whatever she did, Sam would only ruin everything for her again. He definitely seemed to have the whip hand.

‘Where are you living?’

‘I’m not going to tell you. I’m renting a room in the house of a respectable widow. It’s not Buckingham Palace but it’s okay, temporarily. I’m hoping soon to move into a flat.’ She certainly had no intention of telling him that the flat was in Salford. He’d go bananas.

‘When have I heard that before?’ Sam sneered. ‘I shall need to check it out before I allow you to take
my
children there. I’m not having Ruth and Tom contaminated by some cheap dive in the slums, and it obviously isn’t anywhere
too
respectable or you’d tell me where it was. There’s clearly something you’re hiding.’

Everything she said and did seemed to land her in a worse mire. Yet Judy was determined to hold her nerve, telling herself that he was deliberately using these bully-boy tactics in order to force her to give up and go back to him, something she had no intention of doing. He could get one of his women to skivvy for him and follow his obsessive rules in future. She’d had enough.

‘I’m not telling you because you’ve already lost me one set of lodgings,
and
a good job. I don’t want you coming round and creating mayhem so that I lose another. You seem to take great pleasure in knocking me down every time I put a foot on the ladder.’

He laughed at that, seeming to think it amusing. ‘Let’s see if you can climb higher than the first rung without me there to back you up. Now
that
I would like to see.’

Judy ground her teeth together in an effort to hold on to her patience. Not for the world would she allow him to see the depth of her despair, the panic that was building up inside her. ‘I’ll come round on Sunday around ten. I’d like to take them to the park for a picnic. Please have them ready on time.’

He rubbed one hand over a bristly chin, looking doubtful. ‘They have a pretty full routine, homework to do and so on, but I’ll see if we can accommodate you.’

He made this very normal request seem unreasonable, as if she were some maiden aunt or distant relative, and not Ruth and Tom’s mother at all. ‘Please don’t make me beg to see my own children, Sam. I might have made mistakes. I might truly be what you term an unfit mother, but if that’s the case, what sort of a father are you? Ask yourself that.’

When Sunday came round only Tom was ready and waiting for her in his school blazer and cap, looking unusually sad and serious. Judy hugged the little boy, risking embarrassing her son by giving him a big kiss.

He clung to her for a moment, winding his arms tightly about her neck while he whispered, ‘Mummy, I’ve missed you.’

A great lump came into her throat and Judy feared she might be about to disgrace herself by crying, but managed to control herself just in time. Ruth, Sam informed her, had no wish to come.

Judy’s heart plummeted. ‘I don’t believe you. Let me see her, please. I haven’t seen or spoken to my daughter in weeks. She needs to know how much I love her, how I’m doing my best to make things right. Let me at least speak to her.’

Sam shook his head, his face taking on that blank, expressionless detachment that she knew so well. ‘She doesn’t want to see you. Have Tom back by four o’clock, on the dot. I’ve no wish to call out the police and charge you with kidnapping.’ Then he shut the door in her face.

It continued in this fashion over the following weeks, the Wednesdays and Sunday afternoons she was supposedly to be allowed with both children being reduced to an hour or two at most. More often than not Wednesdays were inconvenient as it was his afternoon off from the market, and he wasn’t willing to substitute this day with another. On Sundays, very often Judy would travel the two miles from her digs to Sam’s house by bus or even on foot in order to save herself the fare, only to find the door locked fast and no answer to her knocking.

She would hang around the market for hours, hoping they would return from wherever it was he’d spirited them off to. On occasions he’d roll up eventually in the van looking surprised, as if he’d forgotten that it was her afternoon for visiting, which would make Judy very angry.

‘This really is too much, Sam. You aren’t playing fair.’ But where was the point in standing around arguing when it was already gone three o’clock and he insisted she had them back by four?

Tom continued to be excessively clingy and Ruth rarely joined them in their outings. If she did agree to come it was with ill grace, often refusing to even speak to her mother.

‘It’s all
your
fault we’re in this mess,’ she insisted, when Judy ventured to question her on the matter. ‘How can you be so mean to poor Daddy when he’s tried so hard to make you happy. You’ve just left him all on his own, for no other reason than you fancy working instead of looking after us as a proper mum would. And you’ve got yourself a boy friend.’

Evidently, Sam was not only keeping the children from her, but poisoning their minds against her.

Finally, in desperation, Judy went back to see her solicitor and told him exactly what was happening.

‘It just isn’t working. I seem to have no rights at all. Sam is being extremely difficult, cutting my access times to the bone and sometimes I don’t get to see them at all. Can’t we go back to the magistrates and complain that my husband is being unreasonable?’

Instead of sharing her concern and offering to speak for her in court, the lawyer raised a pair of dark eyebrows and looked down his beak of a nose at her in surprise. ‘Complaining won’t help. I’m afraid you did yourself no service, Mrs Beckett, forming an attachment with a man friend at this juncture in the proceedings. Far better you concentrate your efforts on securing yourself worthwhile employment, a decent home and child-care for your children. Otherwise, I see little hope of you ever getting them back.

It was not at all what she’d wanted to hear.

Helen sensed that Leo had changed in some indefinable way. He seemed more distant, more withdrawn and was rarely even interested in sex these days. They hadn’t made love in weeks, which was unusual, and most worrying.

She was feeling particularly low, in any case. Since Sam had called off their little affair Helen had found life really rather dull. Even ridding herself of her mother-in-law and incarcerating the old bat in a home, which was surely where she should have gone months ago, had proved less satisfactory than she’d hoped. Largely because Leo continued to visit her, not simply on a Saturday as had been the case when Dulcie had lived in Lytham St Anne’s, but regular and frequent visits, sometimes as often as three or four times a week. It was most infuriating.

When she’d remonstrated with him, pointing out that this was quite unnecessary now that Dulcie was no longer his responsibility, he’d glared coldly at her.

‘She’s my mother. I visit her because I want to, because I care about her, not out of necessity or a sense of responsibility.’

‘But
we
don’t have any time together any more. Wasn’t that partly the reason you agreed she should go into the residential home, so that we could regain our privacy?’

‘It was not
my
reason. It might well have been
yours
. Are you saying that it wasn’t simply because you believed my mother to be a danger to herself when she started that fire? Am I missing something here?’ He regarded her quizzically, and for once in her life Helen found herself blushing. The last thing she wanted was for Leo to grow suspicious.

‘I’m simply saying that you make no effort to please me or make me happy, none whatsoever.’ Whatever little control she’d been able to exercise over him in the past, often through deviousness or clever manipulation, no longer seemed to work. Leo simply wasn’t interested in going along with her games.

‘Indeed? Did you make any effort, Helen, to comfort my mother after losing her husband, or make her feel welcome in what had once been her own home? Do you ever make
me
feel welcome in this house, as your husband, unless I jump through whatever hoops you’ve set out for me.’

Helen clicked her tongue with annoyance. ‘I don’t understand you, Leo. You’re not at all yourself these days. I really don’t understand what it is you are accusing me of.’

‘No, you don’t, do you? Maybe that’s the trouble. You’re far too selfish to ever notice that other people might have needs too.’ He looked at her with such sadness Helen’s heart turned over. It felt almost as if he were about to bid her goodbye, which was the last thing she wanted.

‘We could have had so much fun, you and I. Love, happiness, good sex, children, a comfortable life with a sound income and a house in the country, but no, that wasn’t enough for you. Your ambitions reached even higher, clawing desperately for more and more power, and never did involve homely things like babies, or a willingness to include a sweet, gentle mother-in-law in your life, someone who was absolutely no trouble to have around and caused no problems for anyone.’

‘Not for you perhaps, but the woman drove me
mad
.
And I don’t like babies
!
’

‘I’m going out.’

‘Where?’ Helen ran after him as he strode to the door.

Turning, hand on the brass knob, he regarded her without any sign of emotion in his handsome face, not a glimmer of his usual concern. ‘Do you know, I haven’t decided. Somewhere I can be with people who smile and laugh and make me happy. Somewhere I can get very, very drunk, maybe.’

‘Don’t you dare! You’ve no right to speak to me like this, Leo. No right to be so cruel! You’re going to see
her
, aren’t you? Your
mistress
! That’s what this is all about.’ She was screaming at him now, stamping her feet and on the verge of a fine old tantrum.

Leo pushed his face down to within an inch of Helen’s own. ‘Do you know, I just might do that. All these long years of our marriage I’ve behaved impeccably towards you, Helen, with absolute loyalty and never once – not
once
– have you believed me, or appreciated that fact. This overwhelming jealousy that festers within you has destroyed us. It’s eaten away at all the trust and love there used to be between us till there’s nothing left but bitterness, and I’m tired of it. I can’t stand any more, so yes, maybe I will find myself a mistress. Why not? I may as well since you believe me guilty anyway.’ And so saying, Leo stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind him, oblivious to Helen’s screams of fury.

While Leo sat in the Dog and Duck, sunk in contemplative misery, Judy sat in her single room gazing out over the bleak chimney tops of Salford and wondering what she had come to in her life to be so alone and without hope.

Her landlady was kind enough and it wasn’t the place that was the problem, it was her. The city was thriving, new houses and improvements being built all around. Salford was undergoing a renaissance for an area which had once been one of the bleakest and most deprived. Bombed-out sites and the Victorian slums from the city’s dark industrial past were being cleared away; old churches, cinemas and other redundant or dangerous buildings were closing down at a startling rate and rapid progress was being made in the city’s rehousing schemes. Two new secondary modern schools had opened their doors this month already. Modern industries were springing up on the site of defunct cotton mills, and there was talk of Salford becoming a smokeless zone within a decade.

Even the housing shortage was well on its way to being solved with tenants being presented with the keys to new flats and maisonettes almost every week. Judy had been down to the council offices and put herself on the list.

‘How many children do you have?’ asked the young woman, pen poised over a lengthy form.

‘Two.’

‘And where are you living at the moment with your children?’

‘Well, it’s not quite that simple,’ Judy admitted. By the time she’d finished explaining her circumstances, the woman behind the desk was pursing her lips and trying to appear sympathetic, promising to do her best but not particularly optimistic. It really was a chicken and egg situation: without the children Judy had little hope of being granted council accommodation, and yet without a home, she had little hope of winning back her children. Throat aching and blocked by emotion, eyes shining with withheld tears, Judy thanked the young woman and promised to return next week – every week if necessary – to check on progress.
 

 
It felt somehow easier to rejuvenate a whole city rather than the justice system. What justice had she seen, with Sam winning hands down? And did she possess the energy to carry on fighting him?

But without her children, without even Leo, what alternative did she have?

Chapter Thirty-Nine