The September Girls (7 page)

‘That would be very nice, Miss Gates,’ the nurse said sadly when it became obvious a gossip wasn’t on the menu, even if sausage and mash was.

 

That afternoon, Nancy went to see Brenna armed with milk, half a dozen sausages, slightly warm, two bananas, a small, crusty bloomer that she’d made herself and large pat of butter wrapped in greaseproof paper.

‘We never used to have butter in Ireland,’ Brenna said. ‘It was always margarine.’

‘You’ve told me that before. What’s the matter, pet? You look a bit shaken.’ Brenna had been a long time letting her in, and then had only opened the door a crack as if she were expecting someone different.

‘A peeler came this morning. He asked for Colm. Oh, Nancy!’ For the first time since she’d known her, Brenna burst into tears. ‘Yesterday, I prayed to the Blessed Virgin with all me heart and soul to bring us some good luck for a change, but what does she do but send a peeler round to the house and make things worse.’

‘I can’t believe the police are being directed from above by the Blessed Virgin,’ Nancy said dryly. ‘It might be something to do with Colm’s brother. Maybe they’ve found the chap who killed him.’

‘I didn’t think of that,’ Brenna said tearfully. ‘Oh, will you listen to Cara now? That cough’s getting worse.’ She picked up the baby whose face had turned bright red as she struggled for breath and gently rubbed her back. ‘I’ll give her a feed: it’ll soothe her throat.’ With a deep sigh, she opened her frock and attached the baby to her breast.

 

Nancy felt deeply saddened as she walked home. If only there was some way she could help the Caffreys, other than letting them have the Allardyces’ leftovers and the milk that she paid for out of her own pocket. Brenna didn’t know about that; Nancy had a feeling she wouldn’t take it if she did, and so she insisted the milk had been left over from the day before. All Colm’s attempts to do an honest day’s work had failed miserably. They couldn’t go on living in that vile hole in the ground for much longer. It was doing Brenna and Cara no good at all . . .

She still felt sad when she reached Parliament Terrace. What sort of world was it that allowed decent people like the Caffreys to have so little, yet someone like Marcus Allardyce have so much? Liverpool was one of the richest cities in the world, yet half its population lived in abject poverty. It was an absolute disgrace, Nancy fumed. At least there was hope for Russia now that Lenin was in power. In a Communist society, all goods would be publicly owned and be distributed by the state: from each according to his ability, to each according to his means. Such wonderful words! Nancy felt a lump in her throat, confident that one day, perhaps not in her lifetime, Communism would sweep the world and poverty would be a thing of the past.

She spread newspaper on the table and began to peel the spuds for dinner: plain roast lamb with mint sauce, she decided, seeing as she’d been given no orders to the contrary. Eleanor hadn’t been much interested in food since she’d had the baby, and Mr Allardyce often forgot to make his wishes known before leaving for work -
he
seemed a bit forgetful lately.

One day she might go and live in Russia, she mused, and began to sing the ‘Internationale’ in a low, melodic voice. The spuds done, she peeled a parsnip and chopped up a cabbage, then wrapped all the wastage in the paper and took it outside to the dustbin at the bottom of the steps. It was then that she saw the gap where something had been cut out and remembered she’d meant to look for the cutting in his study - she liked to know what was going in. ‘I’ll look after dinner,’ she told herself. But after dinner, Marcus would be there. ‘No, I won’t, I’ll look now. It won’t take a mo.’

A scrap of paper was tucked under the blotter on top of the magnificent desk that had once belonged to Herbert Wallace. Nancy wasn’t the sort of woman who easily gave way to her emotions, but she felt the urge to jump up and down and shout, ‘Hurray’ when she read it.

‘Will Colm Caffrey, brother of Patrick Caffrey (deceased), please contact Messrs Connor, Smith & Harrison, Solicitors, of 47 Water Street, Liverpool, where he will learn of something to his advantage.’ There was a telephone number underneath.

‘Well, blow me,’ she gasped aloud, picked up the telephone and dialled the number with a shaking hand. ‘I’d like to speak to someone about Colm Caffrey,’ she said when a male voice answered.

‘We have had at least a dozen Colm Caffreys call at the office today, imposters every one. Are you about to claim that you are he, and that Mr Caffrey is in fact a woman?’ the voice enquired sarcastically.

‘No, but I know him,’ Nancy said breathlessly. ‘I know where he lives. I know he comes from Lahmera in County Kildare, that his wife is called Brenna and he has two boys, Fergus and Tyrone, and a baby daughter, Cara.’

‘Ah! I do believe we have located the
real
Colm Caffrey at last.’ The voice sounded relieved. ‘When can we expect him in the office?’

‘Tomorrow morning, first thing,’ Nancy promised.

Well, if anyone needed to learn something to his advantage, it was this young chap, Ambrose Houghton thought as he sat behind his desk opposite Colm Caffrey, his wife and small child. The man was badly in need of a shave, all three were dressed in tatters and the smell they emitted was vile. He wondered if it would look rude if he opened the window a few inches to get rid of it, but decided not to risk it. You could never tell, one of these days the chap might become a valued client. Anyway, the temperature outside was sub-zero and the smell was preferable to the cold.

‘Shall we get over the formalities first?’ he suggested. After asking the obvious questions, where was he born and when, his mother’s maiden name, plus a repeat of the other particulars supplied by the woman who’d rung the day before, and having established that this was indeed Colm Caffrey, brother of Patrick, now sadly deceased, he came to the point.

‘It would seem your brother didn’t write and tell you about the house he’d won,’ he said, and rather enjoyed the startled, unbelieving looks on the faces of Mr Caffrey and his wife. The latter had so far not spoken.

‘
Won
!’ the wife squeaked now. ‘A
house
!’

‘A house,’ Ambrose Houghton repeated. ‘He won it in a card game and wanted the deeds made out to you, Mr Caffrey. He said he would write and tell you that very night.’

‘He
did
write and say he had a surprise for us,’ Colm Caffrey said, ‘but we thought we’d never find out what it was once Paddy had passed away, as it were.’

‘It’s a pity that the surprise has been so long in coming.’ From the look of the pair, it had arrived just in time. ‘It’s an end-terraced house in Shaw Street, Toxteth,’ he continued, ‘number one, with two downstairs rooms, a kitchen, two bedrooms, a box room and a small yard housing the lavatory and washhouse.’

‘And it’s
ours
?’ Colm Caffrey said in a strangled voice.

‘Indeed it is, sir.’ The solicitor considered it rather admirable to address such a ragamuffin as ‘sir’ but the man was now a property owner, which was more than he was himself.

‘It’s not like our Paddy to come and see a man of the law.’

‘It is when it comes to property, sir. Documents have to be drawn up, stamped and signed, searches instituted, deeds altered. Your brother was very astute. He knew you couldn’t just win a house and move in without a piece of paper to prove it’s yours.’

‘I never knew you could play cards for houses,’ the wife said. She had released the baby from her shawl and it stared at Ambrose in a friendly fashion. He smiled and it smiled back.

‘You can play for anything on earth,’ he explained. ‘According to Mr Caffrey, they played all night. There were five of them at the start, but three dropped out when the stakes got too high. At one point, he nearly lost all his money, then, “his luck turned”, as he put it, and he won it back. It was early morning when they played one last game and his opponent wagered the house he’d just inherited from his uncle. Your brother must have had nerves of steel, risking all his money on the turn of a card.’ He would have loved to be there. The only card game he knew was whist, which he played with his wife for milk bottle tops.

‘I’m surprised our Paddy didn’t shout the news from the rooftops,’ Colm said with a rueful smile. ‘It’s not every day a person wins a house, but not even his landlady knew about it.’

‘That’s because the loser is a man well known in the area. He asked Mr Caffrey to keep the matter confidential, not wanting his spectacular loss to be made public and let people know what a fool he’d been. Now, Mr Caffrey,’ the solicitor said briskly. ‘I’d like you to sign a few papers - do you wish to leave the deeds and other important papers with Connor, Smith and Harrison? We can store them for you in our strong room.’

 

‘Can we get the tram home?’ Brenna asked when they were outside. She still felt exhausted after the walk into town in the freezing cold carrying a twelve-week-old baby who had felt more like a ton of bricks by the time they’d got there. ‘Surely we can spare the tuppence. We won’t need to pay rent next week.’ She still couldn’t believe they had a
house
.

Colm seemed amenable to the extravagance. They sat on the tram, hardly speaking throughout the journey, too stunned to believe their good luck.

‘Our Paddy turned up trumps, after all,’ Colm said at one point.

‘Indeed he did.’ Brenna felt ashamed of all the names she’d called her brother-in-law. She resolved to say a prayer for Paddy’s soul every night for the rest of her life.

Shaw Street was only a short walk from Upper Clifton Street, and
their
house was the first in a neat terrace of eight, the front doors separated from the pavement by a single step. Colm produced the keys on a ring - two for the front and two for the back - and opened the door. They looked at each other, took a deep breath and stepped inside, Brenna and Cara first, into a narrow hall with stairs at the end and two doors on the left leading off: the first to a parlour in which there was a worn, but comfortable leatherette three-piece, the next to a sitting room that had a table and four chairs and a door leading to the kitchen. Brenda was surprised: she hadn’t been expecting furniture.

Wordlessly, they examined the grubby wallpaper, the cracked oilcloth on the floor, the kitchen with a deep brown sink and wooden draining board and a cupboard to store food. One of the walls had been painted white and there was a tin of distemper on the draining board and a clean brush. They looked in the tiny yard, the stinking lavatory with squares of ancient newspaper jammed on a nail and two large spiders that raced up invisible threads and disappeared through a crack in the ceiling, the washhouse with its rusty boiler and lumps of coal left on the floor, then went upstairs to where there was more grubby wallpaper, a cracked window in the box room, the fireplaces in the bedrooms, like those downstairs, piled high with ash and rubbish. There were beds in every room: a double at the front, two singles in the back, and another single in the box room with two blankets folded on top. They were old beds, but perfectly respectable: the mattresses without a mark on them. After a while, they finished up where they’d started, in the hall.

‘What d’you think, luv?’ Colm asked.

‘It’s like a palace,’ Brenna breathed, starry-eyed. ‘Your Paddy must have bought the furniture and started to distemper the kitchen. The little bed in the box room was probably for him. Remember that woman, the one who gave us the sixpence, saying he was going to live with his brother? It looks as if he might’ve already been sleeping there. Poor Paddy,’ she sniffed.

Colm put his hands on his hips and looked the walls up and down. ‘The place wants scrubbing all over, Bren,’ he said practically.

‘I know. Let’s go back to Upper Clifton Street and fetch our things. I brought a scrubbing brush and some floor cloths from Ireland. We’ll sleep in our house this night, Colm, and as soon as it’s cleaned up a bit, I’ll fetch our Fergus and Tyrone from St Hilda’s. On the way, I’ll call in Parliament Terrace and tell Nancy the news and ask her to thank Mr Allardyce: it was him who saw the notice in the paper and cut it out.’