The September Girls (5 page)

‘What belongings?’ the woman sneered. ‘All he owned were the clothes on his back and a few ould books that I got sixpence for in the pawn shop - he owed two weeks’ board and lodgings when he got himself killed. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do.’ She made to close the door, but Colm put his foot in the way.

‘But his job,’ he said urgently. ‘I thought our Paddy had a job with customs.’

‘Paddy Caffrey never did a day’s work in his life,’ the woman replied. Her face softened slightly when, for the first time, she noticed the tiny baby in Brenna’s arms. ‘He led you on the way he led everyone on. All he had time for was the horses, the dogs and a pack of playing cards. Are you the one who sent him the ten pounds he kept bragging about?’

The glance she gave Colm was so baleful that he took a step back and looked almost ashamed. ‘I am indeed,’ he stuttered.

‘Then you’re nothing but a fool,’ the woman said cuttingly. ‘I heard there was some big card game and I reckon he must’ve lost the lot ’cos I never seen him again. But the night he died, so I was told, he was in some pub buying round after round, as if he was rich as Croesus. I’m not surprised he was followed outside and murdered for his sins. Wait here just a minute.’ She hurried down the long hall that had marble-patterned oilcloth on the floor and flowered paper on the walls. ‘I’m sorry about what’s happened,’ she said when she returned, as if she genuinely meant it. ‘You’re too trusting the pair a yis. Here’s the tanner I got for the books. Your need is obviously greater than mine.’ The door closed and Brenna knew it was no use knocking again.

 

Colm had insisted Brenna take herself and the baby back to Parliament Terrace where Nancy Gates was hanging on to their sack of possessions, to save them lugging it round the streets while they found somewhere to live.

Hours later, Brenna was still in the kitchen waiting for Colm to come back, feeling very much in the way, although the big, kind-hearted woman insisted she was no trouble. ‘It’s nice to have someone to talk to while I get the dinner ready,’ she said. She wasn’t the only servant, she explained. There was Phyllis, the maid, who was bad on her feet, never smiled and lived out, and Mrs Snaith who came three mornings a week to do the cleaning. And a lovely China-woman, Mollie Chang, did the washing, collecting it on Monday and bringing it back a week later when she would take away another enormous pile. ‘She ties it in a bundle and carries it on her head.’ One of the men from the factory doubled up as a chauffeur when one was needed. ‘He’s called Lennie Beal.’

When Cara fell asleep, Brenna laid her on the couch in the sitting room and gave their saviour a hand. The smell of roasting meat wafted from the oven and a suet pudding filled with dried fruit boiled on the stove that had all of six rings: Nancy said the pudding was called spotted dick. Brenna peeled taters, scraped carrots and shelled peas, as she’d used to do in Lahmera, sitting in the open doorway of her home, the bowl balanced in the droop of her skirt, talking to the women across the narrow street who were doing the same thing. She prepared a tray of tea and biscuits for Nancy to take upstairs to the nurse who was looking after Mrs Allardyce and the new baby, and made tea for themselves.

‘How is Mrs Allardyce today?’ she asked when Nancy came back, looking sober.

‘Poorly. Eleanor’s not a strong woman and having babies takes it out of her more than it does most. She hasn’t moved from her bed and the baby’s hardly stopped crying.’ Nancy gave her visitor a shrewd look. ‘You probably won’t believe this, considering the position you’re in right now, but you’re very lucky, Brenna. You’ve got your health and strength, two lovely lads, a perfect baby who hardly cries at all and a tall, handsome husband who thinks the world of you. Eleanor has none of these things. Even her son, Anthony, is a rum sort of child. He sits in his room, hour after hour, refusing to talk to a soul. Saying that, I love the bones of him.’ She sighed deeply. ‘Lord knows what goes on in that little head of his.’

It was late when Colm arrived, weary and downhearted. ‘I’ve found somewhere,’ he said in a despairing voice. ‘An underground room, not all that far away, in Upper Clifton Street. It’s not big enough for Fergus and Tyrone to live with us, so I’ve been round to St Hilda’s and they said they’ll keep ’em until we find somewhere bigger.’

‘I’m not going anywhere without me lads!’

‘I’m afraid we’ve no choice, Bren.’ Some of Colm’s confidence returned. ‘It won’t be for long, luv. I’ll get meself a good job soon, you’ll see.’

Now, eight days later, there was no sign of a job, good or bad, and Brenna was stuck in her prison with nothing to do all day except go for walks. There was no food to cook, no house to clean, no one living next door to jangle with, no children to tell stories to, only Cara who couldn’t understand. The baby’s nappies - an old sheet ripped into squares - were dried on a piece of rope strung across the room, then aired on the back of a chair in front of the evil-smelling stove that made Brenna and Cara cough if it was turned too high.

Nancy had given her a pile of magazines,
Woman’s Weekly
they were called, but Brenna was too ashamed to say she could hardly read. She looked at the pictures of mouth-watering pies, smooth sponge cakes, feathered hats, shoes with pointed toes, embroidered linen, tapestry cushion covers, a cottage with a thatched roof, bowls of flowers beautifully arranged and lacy jumpers to knit yourself. The pictures belonged to a life she’d never known and, in her bleak state of mind, wondered if she ever would.

The night they’d arrived, she’d thought Liverpool a grand, rich place to be, but had discovered there were two sides to the city and it wasn’t so grand and rich for some as it was for others. Her neighbours, for instance, were dirt poor: their children looked half-starved and their feet were bare, whatever the weather, and some of the little girls wore no underclothes at all. It was the same when she went to the shops for paraffin and saw the longing in the thin, drawn faces of people when they looked at the food they couldn’t afford. They bought yesterday’s bread, bones to make soup, broken biscuits. Colm said they came into the market where the vegetables were sold and gathered squashed tomatoes, cabbage leaves, rotten potatoes, worm-eaten apples and anything else the stall-holders had discarded as unfit for sale - if he saw anything half decent, he brought it home himself.

Upstairs, a man lived, Ernie something, who only had one leg and walked with crutches. She heard him leave every morning, the crutches tapping, his foot shuffling, taking for ever to reach the door. Nancy said he’d lost his leg in the war and that he caught the tram to Exchange Station where he sat on the ground outside selling matches.

‘Lloyd George - that’s the prime minister if you didn’t know - promised the veterans they’d return to a land fit for heroes,’ she said bitterly, ‘but who’s going to give a job to a man without a limb? Or two limbs, come to that. Most of the poor buggers end up begging on the streets. Some reward, eh, for risking your life for your country.’

Each day seemed to last a lifetime and she missed Fergus and Tyrone more than she could say, not to mention the sun and the sky, the clouds and the green fields of Ireland. Colm could return home at any time: sometimes with a bob or two in his pocket, sometimes only pennies, and sometimes nothing at all. Brenna always met him with a kiss and a smile because she didn’t want him to know how desperately miserable she was.

The monotony was broken in the most unpleasant way when, three weeks later, on a brisk, windy day, with only occasional spurts of sunshine, the peelers released Paddy’s body for burial. A tearful Colm had no choice but to let his brother go to a pauper’s grave, although he vowed that, if ever he came into money, he’d have him dug up and put in a proper grave with a marble headstone and his name engraved in gold. Brenna pretended to be sympathetic, but couldn’t forget that Patrick Caffrey was responsible for the desperate pickle they were now in. She said nothing to Colm, but if she’d had her way, she would have kicked Paddy’s body the length and breadth of Liverpool and back again.

They left the sad, dark corner of the cemetery in Toxteth Park where the dead were buried in sacks instead of caskets and walked slowly back to Upper Clifton Street, Cara asleep against Brenna’s heart inside the black shawl. She was such a good baby, getting bigger and heavier by the day, full of beans when she was awake and thriving faster than Fergus and Tyrone had ever done due to all the milk her mother drank - Nancy brought round a whole pint a day.

‘What’s going to happen to us, Colm?’ Brenna asked. It was almost November, a whole month since they’d come to Liverpool. Now the weather was getting colder. She dreaded to think what it would be like when winter came.

‘I don’t know, luv,’ Colm sighed. He wasn’t normally a sighing man and looked at the end of his tether. No one could have tried harder to find proper work. And no one could have been more patient than Brenna, never complaining when he came home penniless after another fruitless day.

‘I’ve thought of something we can do,’ she said. She’d thought of it before, but hadn’t mentioned it, knowing it would upset him. ‘I can go cleaning. Didn’t I clean for Miss Francesca O’Reilly for all of seven years? I can do it again and take our Cara with me, and you can still look for work.’

Colm’s face went so red she was worried he was about to have a fit. ‘No,’ he said angrily. ‘I’m not having me wife keeping me and me kids. If I’ve not found a job by Christmas, I’ll just have to think of making money some other way, even if it’s only enough to get us back to Ireland.’

‘What other way?’

‘Never you mind,’ he said, so brusquely that her blood ran cold.

‘You’re never going to do anything underhand, Colm Caffrey?’ He’d mentioned more than once that not all the meat in the markets where he sometimes worked reached its rightful destination. The odd side of beef would disappear and be sold on the sly at a knockdown price. Colm, as honest as the day was long, considered it a quite disgraceful practice.

He put his arm around her shoulders and gave them a squeeze. ‘I said, never you mind, Bren.’

 

They made a handsome couple, Marcus thought as he followed half a street behind. The husband was tall and as thin as his wife, with coal-black curly hair under a tweed cap. There was no collar to his shirt and his elbows jutted sharply through the holes in his jacket sleeves - the holes had been patched, but now the patches were hanging off. Unlike Marcus, whose own features he’d always considered rather coarse, this man’s were perfectly regular, almost refined. ‘He’s a fine young fella, Colm Caffrey,’ Nancy had said. Had the pair been dressed differently, they could have been a duke and his lady out for an afternoon stroll.

He’d been surprised, while sitting in his usual place by the window in the Fish out of Water, when
she
had come out of the house accompanied by her husband. He had followed as far as the cemetery and saw them disappear behind the hedge to the place where the nameless and the dispossessed were laid to rest. They must have come to see the brother being buried, the one who had gambled away their precious money - Nancy continued to keep him up to date with news of the Caffreys, possibly in the hope he’d come riding to the rescue of her new friends.

Marcus scoured the
Liverpool Echo
every night to see if the murderer had been caught, but there’d been no mention of it: the police probably had more to do with their time than spend it searching for one wastrel who had killed another.

The two people in front were talking animatedly. Then
he
put his arm around
her
shoulders and hugged her affectionately. They stopped and looked down at the baby in her mother’s arms, then continued with their walk.

What must it be like to share one’s thoughts and most intimate feelings with another human being? Marcus couldn’t imagine it, yet there was something awfully appealing about having someone to talk to, someone who would listen while you tried to explain how terribly alone you felt. In his club, he had many friends, all male, who would crease up in embarrassment at the mere mention of such a thing as loneliness.

He turned on his heel and went back to work. He wasn’t exactly neglecting the factory, but it no longer occupied his mind day and night. Nowadays, too much of his time was taken up with thinking about Brenna Caffrey.

 

‘I was wondering,’ Nancy said to Brenna a few days later when she came to Upper Clifton Street bearing two pork chops, half an apple pie and the usual supply of milk, ‘if you’d like to bring the lads around to my place on Sunday?’

‘But you always go to see your friends!’ Nancy belonged to the Women’s Social and Political Union formed by someone called Emmeline Pankhurst. They held meetings every Sunday afternoon. It was all to do with women having the vote - a vote for what, Brenna had no idea.

‘This week I’m not.’

‘Mr Allardyce might complain.’ Brenna had never met Mr Allardyce and imagined him to be about seven feet tall and desperately fierce.

‘Sunday’s me day off and Parliament Terrace is me home. I can invite whosoever I like: it’s got nothing to do with Mr A.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Would I ask if I weren’t?’

‘No.’ Yet Brenna had the strongest feeling that Nancy was deliberately missing her meeting just so the Caffreys would have somewhere to take Fergus and Tyrone. It wasn’t always fine on Sundays when they went for walks, mainly around Princes Park, usually so pretty but downright miserable in the rain. Only once had they been taken to the room in Upper Clifton Street where their mammy and daddy and Cara lived, and the look of horror on their faces had upset Brenna to the core. Fergus had cried the whole time and said the room reminded him of hell.

‘I’ll make a nice tea,’ Nancy offered. ‘What time shall I expect you?’

‘Just after two o’clock: the lads have to be back by four.’