The Mill Girls of Albion Lane (16 page)

Lily's straightforward admission was music to Harry's ears and he moved in to slide his arm around her waist. ‘It's funny,' he said.

‘What?' She leaned her head against his shoulder and liked how this time he matched his stride to hers.

‘Funny how you can live on the next street to someone for donkey's years and never think twice about how you feel about the other person.'

Lily hoped that Harry's comment was leading in the right direction but she wasn't sure so she fell back on a flippant remark. ‘Now don't you go hurting my feelings, taking me for granted already.'

‘No, I'm serious.' He'd built himself up to make a long speech and went ahead with it regardless, his face unusually solemn. ‘We come and go – day in, day out. We have our pals and everything's jogging along nicely as usual. You've got Sybil and Annie. I've got Ernie and Billy and everyone down at the Cross. Then all of a sudden something clicks.'

‘Between us?'

‘That's right. I wasn't expecting it but when it happened it hit me like a ton of bricks.'

‘Ta very much!' His way of putting things made her smile. ‘Donkey's years', ‘ton of bricks' – you wouldn't find those phrases in a love poem, but they were Harry Bainbridge to a ‘T'.

‘It was when you were dancing with me at the Assembly Rooms. I tapped you on the shoulder and you said yes and you didn't mind me having two left feet and we were getting along fine – one-two-three, one-two-three.' They were outside Newby's sweet shop, and Harry suddenly seized Lily in his arms and waltzed her round the corner on to Albion Lane. ‘“Goodnight, Sweetheart” – that was when it hit me.'

She laughed and let him hold her close and wrap his coat around her like a warm cocoon. She looked up at him and knew that she wanted to kiss him, only Harry wouldn't stop speaking until he'd got everything off his chest. ‘What hit you?' she whispered.

‘That you weren't just the girl next door, the one everyone relies on, the girl I could have a laugh and a joke with whenever our paths crossed on a Saturday night out. You were much more to me than that.'

‘Stop, before all this goes to my head.' She spoke words that she didn't mean.
Don't stop, Harry
, she should have said.
Tell me everything that's in your heart
.

‘You're beautiful, Lily,' he whispered, stroking her hair. ‘I don't know why, but I must have been going around all these years with my eyes closed.'

‘Harry …'

‘Hush,' he murmured, his breath warm on her cold face, his lips pressing against hers.

For most of Sunday Lily was on cloud nine. Her feet didn't touch the ground, her heart beat faster, her head was in a spin … She smiled to herself as all the clichés and well-worn words of American love songs she'd heard on the wireless rolled together inside her head and made her float on air.

She sewed and looked out on to Albion Lane, crooning softly to the tune of ‘I'll Be Loving You, Always'.

‘What are you making?' Arthur pestered from his perch on the window sill. It had rained all morning and was still coming down so hard that the gutters and drains overflowed and water streamed down the pavement outside the house.

‘I'm making a blouse for Vera at work.' As Lily's foot pressed the treadle and her fingers steered the soft blue fabric under the rapidly pounding needle, she tried not to let Arthur distract her from thoughts of Harry, but as always she'd underestimated her little brother's clamour for attention.

‘When it stops raining, will you come up to the Common with me and play football?'

Lily had come to the tricky bit of gathering a sleeve at the shoulder end then pinning it carefully into the arm hole before she tacked then sewed it in place. ‘No, Arthur, it'll be too muddy.'

‘We could play marbles in the alley,' he suggested.

‘It'll be all nasty and wet.' She adjusted the gathers until she was satisfied they were even then turned the half-finished garment the right side out to check that the sleeve had been set in right. ‘Why not look at a book?'

‘No, I want to play out,' he whined, craning his neck to see who was coming up the street.

‘We can't always have what we want,' Lily counselled. Deciding that she was unhappy with the evenness of the gathers, she unpinned the sleeve, drew out the thread and began again.

‘Harry's here!' Arthur announced as he leaped down from the sill and ran to the door.

At the mention of Harry's name Lily started and pricked her finger. She sucked it as Arthur let Harry in, buttoned up against the rain with his cap pulled well down as usual.

‘I won't stop,' Harry began, taking care not to step off the doormat for fear of dripping everywhere. ‘I happened to be passing and spotted Arthur at the window. I was wondering – shall I take him off your hands for a bit?'

‘To do what?' Lily asked, her finger to her mouth. Harry's unexpected arrival had made her forget her manners, had thrown her out of the happy daydream about him into that painful and real state of uncertainty about what last night's kiss might mean and where it might lead, although this time she was at least sure that it hadn't been an accident.

Now that he'd followed his impulse to knock on the door, Harry too seemed unsure. ‘I don't know – I haven't thought that far ahead. But I could see he was at a loose end.'

‘You're right about that. Arthur can't sit still for five minutes. Anyone would think he's got ants in his pants.'

‘No, I haven't!' Arthur protested with a pained look.

Harry smiled and came up with an idea. ‘It's about this time in the afternoon that the horses down at the brewery are getting fed. Would you like me to take you to see Duke and Prince and the others, Arthur?'

‘Aren't they up on the Common?' Lily checked.

‘Not in this rain. And anyway there's no goodness in the grass at this time of year. So how about it, Arthur, do you want to come with me?'

Arthur's answer was to run for his school coat and hat and in less than a minute he was buttoned, belted up and standing with an excited grin beside Harry at the door.

‘They say the rain will ease up by teatime,' Harry told Lily, kicking himself for not being able to think of something more interesting to say. He didn't know what had got into him lately – weather was as bad as football as a topic of conversation and it felt to him as if the magic of the night before might have melted into the puddles on the pavement outside.

‘Fingers crossed,' she murmured, smiling and nodding them on their way. She waved at them through the window then went back to her sewing, rethreading the needle and trying to concentrate but thinking only of how clear and grey Harry's eyes were when he glanced up from under the peak of his cap, and how those eyes were full of questions that she'd wanted to answer but hadn't been able to, not sitting here at the sewing machine, with Arthur hopping from one foot to the other and eager to be off.

At the end of the afternoon, as the rain eased and dusk fell, Rhoda managed to get out of bed. She came slowly and silently downstairs, grasping the banister and appearing in the kitchen as Lily was putting the finishing touches to Vera's blouse. There was no one else in the house – Walter had taken himself off straight after dinner to the Working Men's Club on Market Row for a change and Evie was cosily ensconced with Peggy on Raglan Road. The blouse was a pretty forget-me-not blue and would suit Vera well, Lily decided, glancing up only to be taken aback by her mother's appearance. Though Rhoda had made the effort to get up and dressed into her grey skirt and navy blue blouse, she looked washed out and was stooping forward with one arm crossed over her thin body, the other hand still grasping the banister at the bottom of the stairs.

‘Don't start.' Rhoda knew that Lily was about to fuss so she cut her off short.

Lily put down the blouse and hurried to help her into the chair by the fire. ‘Are you sure you should be up?' she asked.

‘I had to get out of bed some time and this way it'll stop your father nagging me to fetch Dr Moss,' Rhoda replied as she sank down into the chair. She winced as she reached up to tuck stray strands of hair behind her ears. ‘Don't go on at me, Lily. Just make me a cup of tea, there's a good girl.'

Rushing to do as Rhoda asked, Lily squashed down her fears and cast around for ordinary, everyday subjects. ‘Harry called to take Arthur out for the afternoon,' she told her. ‘That was nice of him, wasn't it?'

‘Yes, Betty Bainbridge has brought him and Peggy up nicely, considering she's been by herself since their father died of the influenza – when would that be? Let me see, it was ten years back, during the winter of 1921. Is that where Evie is now – at Raglan Road?'

Lily nodded.

‘And whose blouse have you been sewing?' Rhoda pointed to the garment, finished except for the buttonholes, hanging over the back of a chair.

‘I made it for Vera Wilkinson at work.'

‘How much will she pay you for that, pray tell?' Rhoda went on.

‘I don't know, Mother. We haven't mentioned money. Maybe she'll give me sixpence out of next week's wage.'

‘It's worth a shilling at least,' Rhoda said sharply then she grew distracted and stared into the fire. ‘You've been to see Margie,' she stated after a lengthy silence, taking the cup of tea and looking directly into Lily's eyes.

Lily found it impossible to deny. ‘I have,' she agreed, noticing that her mother's hand was shaking so hard that the cup rattled in its saucer. ‘I saw her on Monday after work.'

‘And?'

‘And again last night. We ran into one another outside the Victory.'

Rhoda pressed her lips together in a thin line and took a sharp breath to overcome a fresh bout of pain. ‘That's not what I meant. I want to know how she behaved when you saw her on Monday. What did she say? And don't fob me off because I'll be able to tell and then you and I will have a row, Lily, I'm warning you.'

Lily frowned and moved Vera's blouse on to the table as she drew the chair across the room. ‘The last thing I want is an argument,' she insisted, sitting down close to Rhoda. ‘But I made Margie a promise not to tell anyone what we talked about. I'm sorry, Mother, but I can't break that promise.'

Turning her face away, Rhoda nodded then spoke slowly and deliberately. ‘That's all right, I can read between the lines as well as the next person. I'd hoped I was wrong about Margie but it seems I'm not.' As embers shifted and sank in the grate, Rhoda told Lily to put more coal on the fire. ‘How many bags did Holroyd deliver this week?'

Her face burning from the glow of the fire, Lily was torn between her sister and her mother and shocked once again by Rhoda's ability to deny her motherly feelings. It felt like a cellar trapdoor slamming shut. ‘Three bags,' she answered flatly.

‘That'll be nine shillings we owe him,' Rhoda calculated, tapping the arm of her chair with her fingertips. ‘And where will we get that with Christmas just around the corner? Pray tell me that.'

When Lily took the new blouse to work on the Monday morning and gave it to Vera, her fellow mender was all smiles and praise.

‘It's grand,' Vera told her, agreeing to a dressmaking fee of nine pence, to be paid out of her wages on the coming Saturday. ‘Why, I could go into town to Merton and Groves and buy one just like it for ten times the price and no one would know the difference.'

‘You picked a nice, fashionable pattern.' Never one to blow her own trumpet, Lily pointed out another reason why the end result was so pleasing.

‘But the buttonholes are perfectly neat, and look at the cuffs with the beautiful scalloped edging.' A happy Vera showed off the blouse to Mary and Ethel. Jennie, not wanting to be left out, came to deliver her verdict on Lily's seamstress skills and by the time Iris Valentine pitter-pattered into the mending room, the praise was universal.

‘Girls, please!' The manageress clapped her hands and sent them to their work stations, telling Vera to put the blouse back in its brown-paper wrapping. Before long, the atmosphere in the room had changed and heads were bent in quiet concentration. It was only when the buzzer for dinner sounded that the women, backs aching and fingertips tingling from their painstaking work, were free to talk once more.

‘I'm saving up for a length of plum-coloured crêpe de Chine I've seen in the remnant shop on Market Row,' Elsie told Lily as the menders traipsed along the crowded corridor to the canteen. Though Elsie was well over forty, with two grown-up children, she still kept up an interest in fashion and was vain about her appearance. ‘I asked them to put it aside for me and now I'm wondering if you would make it into a dress – one with long sleeves and a little Peter Pan collar, with pearl buttons all down the front. Would you have time to do that after Christmas, do you think?'

Promising to make time, Lily hurried to join Sybil, Annie and Evie at their favourite bench by the window. The talk there was all about Fred Lee, who was absent from work due to an accident on his motorbike on his way home from the Rovers match on Saturday. The rumour was that he'd broken an arm and given himself a black eye when his bike hit a patch of oil and skidded out of control. As a result he'd spent the rest of the day at the King Edward's Hospital having his arm put in plaster.

‘Accident on his motorbike, my foot!' Annie scoffed as she dug into a dinner of pork pie and gravy. ‘According to Robert, that bike's been in the workshop for repairs since last Wednesday. By all accounts it needs a new gasket, which they've had to order from Birmingham.'

‘Oooh!' Sybil gloated over this latest piece of gossip. ‘So who really gave Fred the black eye and why is he covering it up?'

‘Why are we wasting time talking about it?' Lily's dislike for the overlooker made her unusually curt but at the same time she gave Evie a reassuring nod.