The Fall and Rise of Lucy Charlton (5 page)

Ever since she was a small child, Lucy had always known that she wanted to do what her father did. Somehow, even before she understood, it was her whole life. She remembered being very small and the smell of his office and the industry there. She couldn’t even think why at a very young age she had been tolerated. Before she could see over his secretary’s desk she had loved the whole atmosphere of that place.

Her father’s place of work was further along the river’s edge. They lived in Sandgate in Newcastle, right on the River Tyne. Her father’s family had been there for three hundred years. The house was Tudor, timbered, black and white, and it followed the curve of the street, clinging to the bankside as though it must hang on for its life. It was, her mother claimed, insanitary, inconvenient, cold in winter, stifling in summer, too small, in a bad area and sinking into the river, but the family loved it.

Her father walked from there to work every morning and Lucy very often went with him. The building was all brass and mahogany, and the rooms had marble fireplaces.

When she first went to school she would run away and turn up at her father’s office. He had to explain to her that
she must go to school so that she would be useful later in the office.

‘You can be like Miss Shuttleworth.’

‘I don’t want to be like her, I want to be like you,’ she told him.

‘Just don’t tell her that,’ her father would say.

She went there every day after school, whereas Gemma went home to be with her mother. Her father did not seem to mind her presence and she spent her school holidays there; indeed he took her with him to court when he could and she would hover in the corridors where people grew used to her. She knew all the local police and her father’s clients and even though she was not allowed into his office while he spoke to people he would tell her all about it. By the time she was ten she had a fair idea of what it was he did and that it was exactly what she wanted to do.

Her mother complained that there was never any money because her father gave it all away, and her mother was right. Her father helped poor people, he turned nobody from his door; those who needed legal help were always seen. The offices therefore were different from those of other solicitors’ places of work, as Lucy came to understand when she went to various others to take letters or parcels or messages of whatever kind. They didn’t smell of people and sweat, and they had Turkish rugs on the floors. The people she saw there wore suits and the women had large hats and long winter coats.

Miss Shuttleworth was forever giving out tea and biscuits to the people who came to the office. It had an openness about it which Lucy did not experience anywhere else.

Lucy worked hard at school, but it was only because her father said so. She was good at it. Her mother complained.

‘I don’t hold with too much education for girls, it just gives them daft ideas,’ she had said.

Her father ignored her, and though she grumbled she did not try to persuade Lucy not to spend her time at the office. Meanwhile Gemma liked being at home. Her mother taught her to bake and cook and embroider and knit and sew and make clothes and all the other things which Lucy hated. There was, however, one thing the girls agreed on.

They loved their home. They were convinced that nowhere in the whole world could better it. Their bedroom looked out across the river and as small children they lay with the windows open listening to the cursing of the men who came in with the ships and the cries of the gulls high above. These cries were Lucy’s favourite sound; she thought of the gulls as lost souls weaving and circling above the earth.

She loved the sounds of the street traders and she and Gemma would lie in the comfort of the big double bed, listening to their singing, drunken and lewd, which Lucy preferred to the Sunday hymns in the cathedral. Then there were the smells – of fish and dirty water and the general odour of people.

Their mother would come into the bedroom when she thought her children were sleeping and close the windows because she feared the night air unsavoury, but the moment she was gone one of them would get up and open the window wide again. They loved the winter best, huddled beneath their blankets, the curtains pushed well back
against the walls. They would watch the snow fall on the river and the icy moon rise and move across the sky above the water. In spring the yellow flowers danced upon the bankside in Gateshead and the air grew softer, though it was not often hot for more than a few days at a time.

In high summer, June or July, the light barely left the sky and the sailors would hump the prostitutes in the shadows down by the quayside. She and Gemma would snigger over it – though they knew little and made up what they weren’t sure of – and the cries of the women, either true or not, echoed across the water. In autumn the river was awash with leaves and the wind threw handfuls of them into their backyard where clothes were hung out to dry.

Lucy and Gemma fell asleep to the sounds of the Tyne like a lullaby, breathing in the smells from the houses of easterners who had come to Newcastle selling silks and spices. The food smelled strange and wonderful – apples, raisins, sultanas, and rice as white as snowflakes. On the window-ledges they grew green and red chillies, which looked odd to Lucy upon the bushes, like new moons. In their gardens grew tarragon, parsley and mint.

She and Gemma knew the names of all these things, how they smelled and tasted. They had a nursemaid when they were small who lived among the people from eastern countries and so they learned much about them. They did not tell their mother, or the girl would have been dismissed, especially since she sometimes took them away to eat with her family. The food was so much better than the fish with parsley sauce they had at home on Fridays, the tough liver with onions which needed a sharp knife, or the overdone,
leather-like beef on Sundays accompanied by limp vegetables which lacked butter.

They had a cook in those days and her cooking was not the best. She made a decent cup of tea and her cakes were light and tasty, but that was the best you could say for it.

In season they would catch the stink of the herring boats, watch the girls with their pinnies and bonnets, and hear their indecipherable Scottish twang which hung on the air like music. They followed the boats. When she was eight Lucy longed to be one of them; she envied the brazen way they moved with a sway of their hips, as though they knew exactly who they were. That was how she wanted to feel, only she would do it another way, through being her father’s partner and helping to run his office.

As she got older Lucy began to notice how beautiful her sister was. Gemma had bright red hair, you might have warmed your hands upon it, her skin was smooth and white and she had her mother’s eyes, so blue they could have graced the skies. She was slender, each limb perfect, so lovely that every time she went out men watched her, women envied her. She was not so tall that she looked straight into men’s eyes, nor so short that other women were above her. She moved like a dancer her father always said. Her voice was sweet and soft and she was kind and loving.

Lucy looked, she thought, as though her parents had run out of energy or ideas by the time they reached her. She was tall and skinny, her hair the colour of rust, her eyes as dark as the seaweed on the shore. She was so pale that people were inclined to ask if she was ill.

She was, however, very excited when her mother bought her first dress for her first dance. It was in the Assembly Rooms, and she went there with her parents and Gemma amid lots of people. The music began and Lucy spent the whole evening waiting for somebody to ask her to dance. She watched the young men going past again and again. She waited and waited until finally her lips turned to cardboard and her legs to wood. The evening grew yet as she watched her sister and other pretty small girls being turned about the room with smiles and elegance and conversation.

The following morning, a Sunday, Lucy told her parents she was going for a walk. She had the address of the headmistress at her school and she had decided to go and see her. It was not an area she had ever been in before and she walked a long way in rain which turned into sleet. She was astonished that it lay in so poor a part of town. The streets were dark and narrow. The window frames of the back-to-back houses were rotten, and in some cases the space was boarded up. The yards contained coal houses and lavatories. Grubby children played in the streets.

She walked up to the front door of No. 3 Percy Row and rapped her gloved knuckles hard against it. There was no answer; Lucy was half assured Miss Sheane had not come back from church yet, or that perhaps she had got it wrong and the schoolmistress did not live in such a place.

She almost didn’t try again, but she had come a long way; she was glad she did, for she soon heard footsteps beyond the door. The bolts went back, the big key turned in the lock. The door was not often opened; Lucy could tell by the
way that it stuck for several seconds. No doubt it was almost permanently swollen because of the damp, in spite of Miss Sheane’s attempts to prise it open.

When she did so Lucy saw a woman she had feared and respected brought down. She was dressed in a shapeless nightgown of a colour Lucy would have called dirty if she had thought that far. Miss Sheane’s lank grey hair fell to her shoulders. She wore a shawl.

‘Lucy,’ she said in dismay.

‘I’m sorry, Miss Sheane, but I had to talk to you. I do hope you don’t mind.’

Miss Sheane opened the door wider. Sleet was falling almost sideways by then. Lucy was glad to be invited in.

The front room was the colour of sludge. The fire wasn’t lit and the whole place gave off a smell of mould.

Miss Sheane sneezed into her handkerchief, holding it before her red face while waving a hand to indicate that Lucy could sit down.

‘I cannot offer you tea, I’m afraid – the fire in the kitchen has not been lit since last weekend.’

The very idea made Lucy shiver. She took a chair, though she was not sure it would hold her; it was an armchair of sorts, but felt lumpy and old. She tried not to move around. She did not want the schoolmistress to see how shocked she was at the poverty of the way she lived. It was not at all how she had thought such women got by. Miss Sheane regarded her with a little humour.

‘Not much of a recommendation for the single life, is it?’ she said.

Lucy didn’t know what to say.

‘That is what you’re here for, isn’t it?’ Miss Sheane sat down across from Lucy as though the fire burned between them. ‘You’ve been thinking about university.’

Lucy tried to smile. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I thought I knew what I wanted when I was a little girl. I wanted to work with my father and help people. I’m not much good in houses, but then I went to a dance last night and …’ She didn’t know she was going to look at the other woman and tell her, but she did. ‘It was so awful. Nobody asked me to dance and I just hated the whole idea of being so disadvantaged that I had to wait to be asked. I know that sounds silly, but all the boys wanted to dance with my sister. She’s very beautiful, you see. I was so excited at the music and the crowd and … and all the evening I stood there and I wasn’t the only one. I felt so sorry for the other girls too – those who were tall didn’t get asked and those who were … were rather plain neither, and it all seemed so very stupid somehow. I thought it was what I wanted.’

Miss Sheane nodded. ‘You could study law and be like your father.’

‘But women don’t. It’s what I want to do beyond anything and I know it’s what my father wants for me, but now I’m hesitating. Can I really do such a thing?’

‘Somebody always has to be first. It wouldn’t be like this for you. I was a poor Irish girl with a brain. Two of my sisters went into a convent. They were the lucky ones. There were fifteen of us. My mother died. My money has always gone back to Derry, you see. I have nothing. Would you like me to talk to your father?’

‘It seems such a lot to ask though I think – I know that he will support me against my mother.’

‘It isn’t really so bad here,’ Miss Sheane said. ‘I have all this space to myself. I can sit by my fire and I usually make one every evening when I come in but I haven’t been well enough to do anything but go to bed when I return from school. I’m luckier than many women.’

Lucy could hear shouting through the hall, loud cursing and then a crash.

‘They’re always fighting,’ Miss Sheane said. ‘Do the things you want with your life, Lucy. Don’t let other people tell you what to do. They will try but you mustn’t give in. Don’t let this scare you.’

The following day Miss Sheane came to the house in the early evening. She was back to her usual scary self, tall and imposing and wearing a tweed suit, her grey hair twisted into an intricate bun. Lucy had never before wished that the rooms did not have thick wooden doors.

When Miss Sheane had gone Lucy’s father called her into the study and his eyes were lit.

‘Your headmistress thinks you could go to university and do well. Is this what you want?’

‘I want to be a lawyer like you.’

She had never seen her father so pleased. Her mother had heard Miss Sheane leave and she came in now from the sitting room. When Lucy’s father said that Miss Sheane thought she should go to university her mother shook her head.

‘No good will come of it,’ she said. It was not what Lucy had expected. There were tears in her mother’s eyes and her mouth trembled. ‘I don’t want you to go,’ she said, looking
at Lucy in such a way that the tears sprang into Lucy’s eyes too. ‘I don’t want to lose you to all those clever people. You won’t be same afterwards; you’ll have so much book learning that you won’t ever want to come home.’

‘I will always want to come home,’ Lucy said.

‘I want both my girls to marry Newcastle gentlemen and be here and have children so that we can always be a family together.’

‘Lucy will only be going to Durham if they will have her, Miss Sheane says.’

‘Durham is an awful place,’ her mother said. ‘It’s not on a good river like the Tyne.’ Though Lucy couldn’t have explained what her mother meant, she did understand it. ‘We’ll never be a family the same again, and just for her to do what men do – sitting in offices all day and dealing with the scum of the earth and … and with policemen and laws, it’s awful,’ she said. ‘I don’t want that for one of my girls.’