The Fall and Rise of Lucy Charlton (18 page)

‘I own a great deal of property,’ Mr Manson said, puffing out his chest to make himself important.

Lucy waved a hand at the hall. ‘This is a splendid house. Did you do this yourself?’

She had found the way through. He nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it was in very bad repair.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ Lucy said, though she didn’t admire his taste.

‘It was a big job – it was on the verge of collapse.’

‘There must be a great deal of satisfaction to putting things right as you do. And people are bound to notice whether you do or not.’

He stared at her. ‘That sounds very much like a threat, and coming from a young woman—’

‘Oh, I’m not that young,’ she said smoothly, ‘and I’m about to become a solicitor. I have friends who care about these things, as well as the police, and I understand that the local newspapers are all run by the same family, a family who are friends of my employer, Mr Bainbridge—’

The man had put up both hands, his face a mixture of resentment and amusement.

‘I will see what I can do,’ he allowed.

She wasn’t convinced he would, though she had told more than one lie, but then Edgar did know someone who ran the newspapers, an Edward Fleming.

Back at the little house in Rachel Lane she said nothing to the Misses Slaters or to Mrs Formby, for she wasn’t convinced that the landlord had any integrity or care for such people. The little house had never seemed smaller. The children would not leave Frederick alone – they kept stroking him and prodding him and dancing around him – and although Lucy told them politely twice not to poke the old spaniel, because he had begun to growl and she was not going to have him blamed for showing his teeth, in the end she put
on the fire in the sitting room – which they could ill afford – and Frederick was left to snore peacefully by the kitchen fire.

The Misses Slaters were worried about the beds and the bedding – though they found all the blankets they had. They had a sofa yet they could still not accommodate all these people. In the end everybody slept where they could – the two small children and Mrs Formby had Lucy’s bed and Lucy and Tilda took the sofa, while Clay lay on the hearthrug with an old cushion and a blanket.

Lucy found the sofa uncomfortable and she could tell that Tilda did too, although she did not move. The girl was unnaturally quiet and though neither of them tried to brush up against the other it was almost impossible not to.

Mr Manson did not get back to her and day after day the house seemed to get smaller. She had no intention of going to the newspapers. She thought there must be something she could do, but she couldn’t think of it.

*

The following day she went to the store in her dinner break and asked Tilda how she was feeling. The shoe shop was empty, she had timed it well. The shop was dark, in spite of having big windows at the front, and filled with long boxes which held the shoes. Lucy disliked the smell of leather, she presumed it was that; to her it stank of dead cows. The shoes on display in the window were not the kind of things which any woman longed for – no dancing shoes, no party shoes, they were all as stout as though they would keep out the rain, and in black or brown, all laces and plainness, not a ribbon
or a decoration anywhere in sight. The day was so rainy that she couldn’t see into the shadows at the back of the shop.

‘You seem so unhappy,’ she said. ‘Are you grieving for your father, despite what he was?’

‘He was me dad, even so,’ Tilda said. She even looked up.

‘Do you remember being little and him being kind?’

‘Aye, he was, sometimes. He used to read to me when I was our Jan’s age. He learned me the clock. I used to sit on his knee – we had this wooden clock and he used to turn the pointers to show me.’ She stopped.

‘And then?’

Tilda didn’t say anything as though she might have other things to do and didn’t like being questioned. Eventually she said, ‘He wasn’t me dad when he drank.’

‘He began to hit your mother?’

‘She pretended it was all right, but it wasn’t, and I started getting in the road. He thought I was her and he would hit me. And—’

‘And—’ Lucy could scarcely breathe. Tilda had not spoken freely like this to her before and she did not want anything to break the spell. Perhaps it was because they were alone.

‘After he lost his job he couldn’t get another. It made him drink and he worried about me mam and the bairns. He wasn’t even pleased when I got a job at the store. He said it showed him up, that he couldn’t provide for his bairns. When I gave me mam the money he took it off her and spent it all at the pub, so I … I hit him the next time he did it and I bettered him, Miss Charlton, because he was so drunk he couldn’t stand. I got the money back and gave it to me mam so she could feed everybody.’

‘And then?’ Lucy could tell the story wasn’t finished.

Tilda’s head was down. Lucy was so glad there was nobody about or she was sure she would not have gone on.

‘He came to the shop. I was so pleased with my job, you know. I’d actually done something that made us respectable, in spite of where we came from. I felt like I might make something of me life like me mam wanted me to. She was so proud of me. And they told me that I would be the manageress because Miss Thompson is old and has had enough, and she’s all right, anyway. She lives with her mam and they have a bit put by and she was pleased for me to have it – she showed me how to do everything and she was kind with it, you know, and I felt so good. I thought mebbe I could keep us all, that was what I really wanted but …’

Lucy waited. The girl was silent now, head down, her body almost turned away from Lucy. She was in tears – Lucy could see the shine of them on her cheeks – and as a friend it hurt her to push, but as a would-be lawyer she couldn’t stop now.

‘And then?’ Lucy hardly dared say it.

‘Miss Thompson had gone home to her mother. She let me lock up. She knew I liked to, that it made me feel as if I were in charge, you know. I locked up and I didn’t look round and when I did, because I thought I heard something, he grabbed me and started hitting me. He pulled me hair and he forced me up the side street, just round there,’ she indicated with a gesture, ‘and then he … and then he …’ She stopped.

There was silence and not much to listen to outside, just the general day-to-day things, Lucy thought. She wished she
was in it, and tried hard to listen to the conversation which was going on, the sudden laughter just beyond the door, but it meant nothing. She knew now that she could never be a part of that without thinking about how to make things better, having decided to try to do more.

‘Can you tell me about it?’ she said.

‘I don’t know how to say it.’ The girl shook her head and the water from her eyes overflowed, making fresh tiny marks upon her face. The tears ran faster and faster until her breathing was ragged. She sobbed, tiny sounds at first, but they caught up with one another until they were continuous, even though she began to speak again.

‘He was me dad – how could he do that to me? I don’t think he knew who I was. Or mebbe he was so jealous of me job and that I had done well and me mam was pleased – he couldn’t bear her to like any of us, you see. He wanted to come first always and when you have four bairns I don’t think it works like that. I don’t think me dad had ever come first with anybody until he met me mam and she was so lovely to him. She is lovely, isn’t she?’

Lucy made soothing noises and nodded her head.

‘Me mam cared so much about him. She really did. It must have been all right until I was born and I think he blamed me that she didn’t put him first any more, although she still seemed to. He got his dinner first, she did what he wanted, she asked for nowt from him, but when he couldn’t keep us then it all went wrong. He was ashamed of himself.’

Lucy said nothing. She didn’t move. She didn’t want to change the mood and she prayed as she had not prayed in a long time that nobody would push open the shop door and
interrupt because she had the feeling they would never get this far again.

She waited and waited, her nerves beginning to shred into tiny pieces. Any moment now some stupid person would want slippers or everyday sensible shoes in which they could walk for miles and not care. She glanced around the shop, but it was no comfort, it didn’t distract her. She would not have said a word if Tilda had stood there forever.

‘I’m having his bairn, Miss Charlton. How in God’s name can I ever tell me mam?’

Lucy didn’t know what to say. She felt as though her stomach had plunged to the floor. She couldn’t help Tilda by saying that she’d had the same experience because she hadn’t, and although at the time it had seemed to her the very worst thing that could happen to a woman, it was obviously not so, not nearly. She could have laughed at herself for her naivety.

‘Should I say some lad got me like this and that I let him – and me mam would think I was cheap and not worth her time – or that somebody in the dark did it and I didn’t know him, or that me dad did it, with three other bairns and she being his wife. She cared for him. How could she live with that, how could she live knowing that she loved a man who could lose himself in such a way that he could do a thing like that to his own daughter?’

Lucy’s experience did not take her to here. She had no idea what to say. Tilda was looking at her.

‘I’m going to lose me job because I’m having a bairn and it will show, and me mam will be ashamed of me because I’ll be a bad lass then. Everybody will stop talking to us and
we will have no money, not even to run away to some place where nobody knows us. What will we do?’

Lucy surprised herself. ‘We’ll think of something,’ she said. ‘We’ll sort something out, I promise.’ And then she realized, she saw coldly as if through sleet, what had happened to this girl, how she had taken matters upon herself. She should never have had to do that had the police or anybody cared enough to have helped.

Lucy was so cold that she wanted to shiver. She couldn’t move. She kept on looking at the girl, pitying her and yet shocked, trying to see the situation as real so that she could work something out to help, but she was unable to do so.

Tilda stood there, silent. She was quiet for a very long time and Lucy waited. A sudden thought occurred to her, so awful that her skin felt as if it were crawling.

Tilda looked at her. ‘You know, don’t you, what I did?’

‘Tilda—’

‘Right then. I killed me dad. I would have said so too if things had gone any further. I never thought they would take me mam like that. I shouldn’t have done it, I know I’ll go to hell, but I couldn’t stand it no more. I found the can, it was like a chance – and I went to the garage and bought the petrol. I dressed up and held meself like an older woman. I knew I could get us out – I planned it, I was sure of it – and I got the bairns downstairs, saying it was a game. Our Clay understood and he wouldn’t have cared anyroad, our Clay cares about me first, so all I had to do was rouse me mam once I’d set it alight. It was so easy I wished I’d done it sooner, but when it was over I knew it was a terrible sin and that I shouldn’t have. I knew the minute you came back
into the house to help us that it was wrong and when Mr Hardy went back in for me dad – I just couldn’t think any more, I thought you would both be killed and I would have done it.’ She broke down then. ‘God will never forgive me,’ she said.

Lucy was so shocked that she didn’t know what to say. She was also very soon amazed at herself that she hadn’t realized, but then how could she have done so – she felt that she had not known Tilda at all until now. She found her voice and made it loud; she couldn’t have this young girl blaming herself for the things life had thrust upon her.

‘Of course he will,’ she said, hearing herself being brisk and glad of it. ‘There’s no point in vicars saying that God is merciful if people don’t believe such things. That’s what he’s there for,’ Lucy said with a confidence she didn’t feel.

Tilda wept and Lucy stayed with her. But when the long afternoon finally ended, and there were no customers because the day was dark and rain beat off the windows and the roof, Lucy didn’t know what to do.

Tilda didn’t want to leave the shop and Lucy could understand that. She was reluctant to go home and face her family. Lucy didn’t know what to say, the only place she had to go was the Misses Slaters’. She thought Edgar might help, but he was so respectable – she had the feeling that he cared so much for the law, he understood it and was involved in it, that he would have to give Tilda up to the police. Because however you argued it she had killed her father.

Lucy tried to look at the problem from the other side as well, because she knew that a good lawyer would do so. She thought she might go back and talk to Edgar and see how she
felt about what he said, but she wouldn’t tell him directly what had happened.

Tilda had to stay until closing time. Lucy said she would come back for her in an hour when she locked up. When she arrived back at the office the door was opened, although Mr Clarence had gone home. She knocked on Edgar’s door and heard his voice, and when she put her head around the door he smiled at her.

‘Miss Charlton.’

‘Actually, I’ve got a bit of a problem,’ Lucy said, ‘and I don’t know what to do.’

‘Come in,’ he encouraged her, getting to his feet like the gentleman he was.

She hesitated.

‘It’s about the Formby family, Tilda in particular.’

‘I thought it had all been sorted out,’ Edgar said with a slight frown. ‘Not really,’ she said.

‘They had no proof that Mrs Formby did any such thing and the charges were dropped,’ Edgar said.

‘It isn’t as simple as that.’

Edgar looked at her. ‘No?’ he said. He hesitated before adding, ‘You do have to be careful, you know, not to get too far in so that your judgement is at fault. ‘

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you can get on the wrong side of things so easily and then a solicitor is not in a good position to do the right thing. You ought to try and keep the family at a distance because you will work better for them that way. You have to be able to see clearly so that you can do your best for them.’