Trinidad Street (46 page)

Warmth stole briefly across Florrie’s face. She returned her hug.

When Harry returned, they debated what should be done about Milly.

‘Do you think she’ll stick to the story?’ Ellen asked.

‘God, I hope so. If she don’t, we’re all sunk,’ Harry said.

‘What are we going to say to the neighbours? It’ll look funny if we don’t say nothing, and once it’s out they’ll all be over here. They’ll see she’s odd. I mean, you can’t miss it. She’s acting ever so strange,’ Ida said.

‘Aunty Alma’ll be over here anyway. She always does of a Sunday,’ Florrie reminded her.

‘Yeah, and you won’t keep her out of Mum’s bedroom.’

‘You’ll have to say . . .’ Ellen was thinking aloud. ‘You’ll have to say that she was so upset your dad never come home that she went and fell down the stairs.’

The others looked at her.

‘That’s it! They’ll swallow that, all right. And it’s only natural that she’s still funny now, ’cos he’s still not come back,’ Ida said. ‘You are clever, Ellen.’

‘And Ellen can tell the neighbours, too. If you don’t mind?’ Harry said.

Ellen shook her head.

‘Then it looks natural. She’s come in here now –’

‘To borrow some tea,’ Ellen told him.

‘To borrow some tea. Give her a bit now, Florrie, so’s we don’t forget. Then we tell her all about Dad not coming home, and she tells her lot and anyone else she runs into.’

‘I think one of you better go over and tell your aunt Alma,’ Ellen said. ‘After all, you’d do that, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t just sit in here by yourselves, worrying. First thing you’d do is go and see her. And Maisie too – you better go round and see her.’

And so the story spread. By midday most of the street knew. The Turners’ house was filled with sympathizers. Florrie slipped next door and volunteered to take Ellen’s babies for a walk. Ellen, recognizing her friend’s need to get away, tucked them up in the pram.

‘Take as long as you like. I only just fed Teddy so he won’t need another one for three or four hours.’

‘Thanks, Ellen.’ Florrie gave a tight smile.

Her knuckles were white on the handle as she marched off down the road. It was a long Sunday afternoon for Ellen, wondering how Milly was holding out next door and listening to first Gerry then Alma speculating as to where Archie might be.

Milly was the weak link. All the rest, even Bob, realized exactly what the price of truth would be. But Milly was unpredictable. Harry stopped outside the door as he set off for work on Monday morning. Ellen was scrubbing the step.

‘Ellen?’ He glanced up and down the street. Other women were already cleaning, people were going out. ‘Can you pop in and see to my mum sometime? She’s still – you know . . .’

‘Yeah, right.’ Ellen knew exactly what he meant. She sat back on her heels and looked up at him. ‘Don’t worry, Harry. I’ll see she’s all right.’

She did not feel as confident as she sounded. The moment Gerry and the lodgers were out of the house, she went next door. Milly was still in bed. This roused twinges of alarm. Usually they had difficulty in getting her to lie down; she dragged herself around, getting the family off in the morning, however badly Archie had beaten her.

‘You feeling poorly, Mrs Turner?’ she asked. ‘Like me to make you a cup of tea?’

‘I don’t want nothing.’ Her voice was totally expressionless.

‘Well, how you feeling? It’s cold up here. How about coming down into the kitchen? Florrie made the range up before she went and it’s burning nicely now.’

‘No – no – I couldn’t.’

‘But it’s much warmer downstairs.’

‘I couldn’t – not there. Not in there . . .’ Milly’s chin trembled.

Ellen began to understand. ‘You got to come down sometime, Mrs Turner. You can’t stay up here for ever. Come on, now. It won’t be so bad once you done it. Get it over with, eh?’

‘No.’ Tears began to course down her cheeks. Milly made no attempt to wipe them. She just lay there, weeping.

‘Oh, Mrs Turner, don’t take on. I know it’s dreadful but . . .’

But what? But it’s a good thing he won’t be coming back to knock you around any more? Somehow, Ellen knew that this was not how Mrs Turner saw it.

‘But crying ain’t going to make it any better,’ she substituted.

Nothing she could say seemed to make any difference. Milly refused to move, refused to eat or drink. Ellen did not know what to do. She was relieved when she heard the front door open and Maisie calling up from below. She left Milly in the charge of her daughter, but spent the rest of the morning worrying. Supposing Milly told Maisie what had really happened? Maisie, of course, would say nothing to endanger her sister, but Ellen was sure that the fewer the people knew the truth, the easier it would be to keep the secret. She went back next door again in the afternoon, to find Milly much the same.

‘You do know we mustn’t tell anyone, don’t you, Mrs Turner?’ she said. ‘He never come home Saturday night. You must remember that.’

Once again the tears stood in Milly’s eyes.

‘It’s all my fault, all my fault,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t never have happened if it weren’t for me. He’d be alive now.’

‘But it ain’t your fault, Mrs Turner. It was just a dreadful accident.’

‘I’m a wicked woman. It happened because of me.’

It was fixed in her mind. Milly was not listening to reason, and Ellen ran out of arguments.

She still had not faced the kitchen when the news came that a body matching Archie’s description had been found. By great good fortune, it was evening and Harry was home. He persuaded the policeman that his mother was too ill to get up, and went to identify the body. Even though he had seen drowned people before, even though he had hated his father, it still made him feel sick. He took one glance at the bloated features with the empty eye sockets and looked away.

‘That’s him,’ he said.

‘Looks like someone done him over. Lots of nasty blows to the head. Would he have had anything worth taking about him when he went out?’

‘He had his drinking money,’ Harry said.

‘Argumentative sort of bloke, was he?’

‘He was when he’d had a few.’

‘Ah – well. Can’t release the body yet, Mr Turner. We got to send it for a post-mortem. Unnatural death, like. Have to be an inquest.’

Harry nodded, outwardly taking it calmly, though an unreasoning fear shot through him. An inquest. They might find something, some sign. It might all come out. If they started questioning his mother, she would never hold out.

Somehow, they all lived through the days that followed. Now that Archie had been found, Milly could openly mourn his death. The women in the street came in and comforted her, and she was at last coaxed downstairs. Florrie was grateful for this. It was one small burden less. She slipped in and out of the house like a shadow, sharing the housework and cooking with Ida after the long day’s work, trying to keep the household afloat. She made herself as inconspicuous as possible, so that nobody would think to include her in their sympathy or ask what she thought had happened on the night of her father’s death.

Florrie put food on the table for the others, and watched them persuade her mother to eat, but was unable to swallow more than a mouthful or two herself. Food seemed to choke her. The little that she did get down lay heavy in her stomach, giving her pains. The days were bad enough, but the nights were worse. She stayed awake while the events of Saturday night revolved over and over again in her mind.

‘I’m glad,’ she said to herself, repeating it like a charm against the horrors of the darkness. ‘I’m glad he’s dead. He deserved to die.’

When she did sleep, nightmares pursued her. She was back in the kitchen again, with the chair leg in her hand, but her father snatched it from her and beat her mother to death and then started on all the others until there was just him and herself amid the bleeding bodies, then he came towards her . . . Or her family was sitting in the kitchen when she came in, and as one they all stood up and pointed at her, until she had to turn and run out into a foggy and featureless night, but wherever she went, people appeared out of the gloom, pointing at her with a stony absence of forgiveness until she knew there was nowhere she could go, no one she could turn to . . .

She woke, sweating and crying out, to be comforted by Ida. But once her sister had gone back to sleep again, she was terrified of the same nightmares recurring. She did not know what was worse, the dreams or her own night thoughts.

Most of all, Florrie was haunted by her mother. That was when the
remorse and the guilt gripped her, when she was confronted by a face blank with grief, and heard the way her mother blamed herself, and saw her inability to do anything but sit and stare into space. Every night she resolved to speak to her, to tell her she was sorry, to try to get through the invisible barrier that her mother had put up between herself and the world. Every morning the words dried in her throat. She could not do it.

Without realizing it, she spoke less and less to anyone, shrinking within herself as her already slight body grew thinner still.

‘Florrie?’

She flinched as if she had been struck. Her nerves were raw.

‘Florrie, you look really poorly. Are you eating properly?’

It was Ellen, her kind face creased with concern.

‘I’m all right.’

‘You’re not all right. You’re ill. You got to keep your strength up, Florrie. You’ll fade away.’

She shook her head. She even found it difficult to talk to Ellen.

‘Jimmy Croft was speaking to me yesterday. He says he’s real worried and can’t get a word out of you. I told him you was all shook up about your dad and your mum and everything, and he’s got to be patient with you. But you can’t keep him waiting for ever.’

She wanted to go to Jimmy. She wanted to feel his arms round her, to give in to all the raging emotions that she kept pent up so tight inside her, to cry and cry on his shoulder. But she was afraid, afraid she might say something.

‘I can’t go out. Not at the moment.’

‘After the inquest, then. Once you got that over with, you must pick up the threads again.’

‘I don’t know.’ She could not imagine life ever being normal again.

‘You must, Florrie. Don’t let him slip away. Don’t make the mistake I did. He’s a good bloke, is Jimmy. He loves you, and I know you love him. Don’t mess it up. You’ll regret it all your life if you do.’

Slowly the words sank into her brain, the sense of them trickled down and connected. A little of the fog of fear, guilt and defiance that surrounded her cleared. She looked at her friend and for the first time since the night of her father’s death, considered something outside herself and her family.

‘Do you regret marrying Gerry?’

She saw Ellen bite her lip, saw loyalty and caution war with truth.

‘I regret not marrying your Harry.’

‘Oh.’ It opened up a whole new way of looking at things. ‘I never thought . . .’

Ellen gripped her arm. ‘So don’t do the same yourself, see? Promise me?’

Slowly, she nodded.

‘You’ll start going out with him again after the inquest?’

‘Yeah.’

But first there was the inquest to get through. Perhaps it would all come out. Perhaps she would be sent to prison. Perhaps she would hang.

‘We’ll give him a good send-off, Mum,’ Harry said. ‘You just name it – black horses, plumes, ham tea . . . Anything you like.’

Milly shook her head. ‘The expense.’

‘Never mind the expense. I can afford it. You just say what you want, Mum, and you can have it.’

‘I don’t know. I can’t think.’

‘Come on, you’d feel better if you tried to think about it. What d’you think he’d’ve liked, eh?

Harry was at his wits’ end. The inquest was over; his sister was safe and his mother no longer had to fear either questioning from the police or her husband coming home to beat her up, and yet still the family was reeling from the effect of his father’s death. His mother in particular seemed to be getting worse instead of better. She was unable to do anything. The girls had to nag her even to wash herself, and forcibly took her clothes away from her and gave her clean ones. She was locked away from them in a grey wilderness. Harry had some inkling why. It was the same terrible burden that he carried, a knowledge that the truth had been hidden, making him a party to the death. Even though he was convinced that what they had done was for the best, still he had to cope with a constant feeling of guilt and deception dragging at him like a stone. For his mother it was worse. She still held on to the idea that it was her fault. More than that, she actually appeared to be missing his father. This Harry could not comprehend.

So he pinned his hopes on a good funeral. Everyone said that funerals were great healers. It was worth taking out his precious savings if it helped his mother, and if he was honest, the thought of spending on his father salved a little of his own guilt as well.

The girls helped with the preparations, Maisie and Alma rallied round, and Ellen came in from next door. It was the best funeral the
street had seen for a long time, gaining unmixed approval from everyone. But still the most they could get Milly to do was get dressed and actually attend. For the rest, she just sat and let it all go on around her.

‘I don’t know what to do with her,’ Harry confessed to his aunt.

‘She’s grieving, believe it or not. You’ll have to let her get over it in her own way,’ Alma told him.

But as the weeks went by, nothing changed. If anything, she seemed to withdraw further into herself. Harry felt helpless. It was like navigating though fog; there were no points of reference. When his father was alive, he had worried about his mother, but at least he had felt he could do something in defending her from the worst of his father’s excesses. Now there was nothing. He could not reach her.

He wished there was someone he could really talk to about it. Alma was a brick, but she did not know the whole story. He could not speak to Florrie since it was she who had set the whole thing off and he did not want to heap any more on her head. The obvious choice was Ellen. He longed for her wisdom, her reassurance. Often it seemed to him that if he could just hold her in his arms again, the whole problem would be eased. But she was cut off from him. He stuck by what he had said in the gardens at Southend. She was married to Gerry, and that was an end to it. When they met on the doorstep or in the street, Ellen would promise to look in on his mother, and he would thank her. They were neighbours, tied up in the same secret, but that was all.