Unforgettable (10 page)

She walked back home more jauntily. It really felt like summer at last and it was turning into a lovely day. Maybe her mum would feel like taking a turn to the park around the corner. She hardly went out of doors now, but the sun would do her good, and the doctor had advised her to stay active for as long as she could. She rarely got up before midday, but it was nearly that already.

The minute Gracie went inside the house she heard the sound of high-pitched wailing, and found two strangers in the parlour with her mother. They were large, unkempt-looking men, looking decidedly uneasy and alarmed at the sight of the trembling woman in the nightgown, who was clinging on to the edge of the table for dear life.

‘What's happened?' Gracie gasped. ‘Mum,
what are you doing out of bed, and who are these people?'

Her heart leapt with fear, but her mother started gasping out a reply.

‘They work down the docks with your dad, Gracie. You know he didn't come home last night, but that's nothing unusual.'

She had to pause for the racking pain in her chest, holding her hand to her heart, and Gracie made her sit down before she tried to say any more.

‘I'm sorry, miss,' one of the men went on agitatedly, ‘but she had to be told, see, and we was sent to do it. They found Mick this morning.'

‘Found him? What do you mean, they
found
him? Where was he, then? Dead drunk behind a boozer, I suppose,' Gracie snapped, angry and upset that her mother should have been so frightened, and disgusted with her father that they should be hearing such news.

‘No, miss. Just dead,' the other man said brutally, at which Queenie began wailing again.

‘For Christ's sake, Bert, couldn't you have made it a bit easier for the little maid to hear?' his mate snarled.

‘I'm not a child!' Gracie heard herself shouting, her heart hammering in her chest fit to burst. ‘What do you mean—he's
dead?
How
? Are you sure?'

It was a daft question, and she didn't want it to be true. Her head was bursting with a mixture of emotions. She hated him, but she didn't want him dead. She wanted him home and whole, the way he'd been when she was a small girl and he'd bounced her on his knee, before the drink had turned him into the monster he was now. She heard the sobbing in her own throat and smothered it with an effort. Her mother was ashen-faced, and she put her arms around her to comfort her.

The one called Bert tried to defend himself.

‘Well, it's sometimes best to come right out with it, in my opinion. It's Mick Brown all right.' He cleared his throat uncomfortably. ‘There was a drunken brawl at one of the pubs last night, and Mick was in the middle of it. He must have staggered about and fallen in the docks. The current smashed him about during the night. I'm sorry, Missus, but it took a while for him to be identified properly. The constables say somebody in the family will have to do it too. They've taken him to one of the unloading sheds to clean him up a bit.'

He stumbled on, making things graphic, making things worse. Gracie listened in horror, trying not to imagine her father's
body being buffeted about against the concrete wall of the docks for hours on end … and then she realized that she would have to be the one to identify him. It would be more than her mother could take. Right now, she seemed to have shrunk down in her chair, saying nothing, just keening softly in that terrible, heart-rending way.

‘We was just sent to tell you what's happened, miss. The constables will be coming to see you soon, I daresay,' the other man went on. ‘And she don't look too good neither,' he added, with an uneasy look at Queenie.

‘Thank you,' Gracie mumbled, though it seemed bizarre to thank people for coming to tell her her father was dead. You did it, though. You went through the motions of being polite, because it was what you had been brought up to do.

She tried to think what to do next.

‘Would you ask my next door neighbour to come in, please? I'll get her to sit with my mother while I fetch the doctor.'

They were clearly relieved to get out of there, their duty done. Gracie wondered if they had drawn lots to see who had to do the dirty work, and if they had chosen the short straw.

A few minutes later, while she still held her
mother in her arms, Mrs Jennings came rushing into the house, her face shocked.

‘Oh, my poor Queenie! You go and do what you have to do, Gracie love, and I'll take charge here. The poor lamb needs to be in bed, and I'll make her some hot sweet tea.' In an aside, she added: ‘You'd better fetch the doctor quick. It looks like there's more need to attend to the living here than the dead.'

Gracie rushed out of the house, tears streaming down her face. She didn't need telling that the news had devastated her mother. Whatever kind of a rat he had been to her in the last few years, he was still her husband, the breadwinner, and she had always been a loyal wife. She would mourn him to the end of her days—however long that might be.

Gracie felt as if she had been rushing around like a mad thing for days, when in reality it had only been a few hours. But her whole life had changed again. Her father was dead, and she was still desperately trying to block out the gruesome sight she had been faced with in the unloading sheds at the docks. Whoever—or whatever—that was, it wasn't her father.

Her father was the man who had gone to work the previous day, and left his womenfolk relieved that he hadn't come stamping and hollering into the house at bedtime, reeking of beer as usual. He was the young man who had swung her around in his arms when she was a small girl, filling her head with exciting stories about the big ships that came from faraway places to Southampton docks.

Her father had once been a loving parent who hadn't been consumed with drink … and now her mother was racked with guilt, knowing that the relief she and Gracie both felt, was because they no longer had to put up with his moods and tempers. And the guilt was doing Queenie no good at all.

‘I've given her something to calm her down,' the doctor told Gracie. ‘She's taken this badly, which is only to be expected, and she'll need careful watching. Her heart is further weakened by the coughing and retching from her illness, and this shock is enough to tip her over the edge.'

He never minced his words, and Gracie thanked him numbly. She had thanked the two men bringing them the news about her father, and voicing her gratitude at being warned of a death sentence seemed just as farcical.

The doctor looked at her sharply. ‘You must take care of yourself as well, Gracie. You need to be strong for your mother now.'

‘I know. I don't want her to go to the funeral, but she's insisting on it.'

‘Don't try to stop her,' he said brutally. ‘She needs to say good-bye to your father properly, and it can't make much difference in the long run.'

‘What does that mean?' Gracie said, hating him for what she knew damn well he meant.

‘My advice is to make the most of your mother while you've still got her. Now, about arrangements—if there's anything I can do to help, let me know.'

She could read his mind. They lived in a
poor part of the town; they weren't a well-off family, and if there was no money … She lifted her chin. ‘I shall see to everything, Doctor. Mum was always thrifty about life insurances, and she's also been paying into a funeral club for years. We shall manage.'

She stopped talking, afraid that her voice would break if she had to say much more. Queenie said the funeral club payments had been intended for the eventual death of both parents, though since the onset of her illness, it was obviously thought that she would go first. Nobody had expected Mick to die yet, especially in such a tragic manner, however ignominious. It was still the loss of a husband and father.

A week later, Mick Brown was laid to rest, and the neighbours rallied round with pots of tea and sandwiches ready for when the two women returned from the churchyard. By tradition, they wouldn't return to an empty house, and the curtains that had been drawn all the week, were pulled back to let in the daylight.

A clutch of Mick's workmates and drinking buddies had been at the graveside, some muttering good words about him, others looking embarrassed and awkward to be there at all. Gracie couldn't help wondering savagely which of them had been involved in
the punch-up that had led to her father staggering about in a drunken rage and which had eventually led to his death. But what did any of it matter now? The death had been recorded as accidental, and there had been enough witnesses to vouch for the way Mick had gone lumbering off in the night.

All Gracie wanted was to get this day over. They didn't invite people back to the house afterwards. Gracie had insisted that there was to be no bun-fight, and only the women neighbours who had helped with tea and sympathy would be there waiting for them. And Percy Hill.

‘What's he doing here?' Gracie hissed to Mrs Jennings, when she had got her mother settled in an armchair with a cup of tea.

‘We couldn't keep him out,' Lizzie said resentfully. ‘Calls it his duty to pay his respects to one of his tenants, but he's no more than a bloody leech, pardon the language, casting his eye over his property, and making sure the rent will still be paid now your dad's dead and buried.'

Gracie flinched, wishing she didn't make it sound so final. Which it was, of course. No matter how solemnly the vicar intoned the words about life everlasting, and our brother Mick being sent to a higher place to be with
his Maker, and all that religious stuff, it didn't change anything. You were still dead and buried.

She swallowed a sob, turned around and cannoned straight into Percy Hill, coming out of the parlour. His hands went out to steady her, and she was thankful she hadn't yet taken off her costume jacket so that she didn't have to feel the pressure of his fingers on her bare arms.

‘Steady now, Gracie. We don't want two accidents in the family, do we?' he said in his cloying voice. Even when he was trying to be sympathetic, which she presumed he was trying to be now, he still had that nasty little calculating gleam in his eyes.

‘Thank you for calling, Mr Hill,' she said, keeping her voice distant. ‘My mother and I are bearing up quite well in the circumstances.'

That was what you said, wasn't it? Even when your heart was breaking, and you wished this oaf and his like to Kingdom Come, you said you were bearing up quite well in the circumstances.

‘We'll be fine with our neighbours now, thank you,' she went on pointedly, hoping he would take the hint. ‘Women need to be together at a time like this.'

He pressed his hand over hers. It was
clammy and moist, and she had an enormous job not to fling it away from her.

‘I understand, my dear. Just remember that you have a father figure in me, and if there's any little thing I can do for you, you only have to ask. I'll leave you now, and I'll be along to see you at the end of the week.'

For the rent money, of course. The blood money. For a moment, Gracie felt a violent urge to laugh out loud at his hypocrisy, and really thought she was going to do so. And how would that look on the day of her father's funeral!

But once he had left the house, the women relaxed, and began the custom of telling their own tales about the deceased, and their own shared experiences of child-bearing and deaths in an attempt to cheer up her mother. It was an odd kind of therapy to Gracie, but it was what they did, and it seemed to work, so that by the time they were at last alone, her mother had a little more colour in her cheeks and was actually smiling at some of their anecdotes.

But it was short-lived, and in the next weeks Gracie had more to worry about than the regular visits of the landlord, as Queenie went downhill rapidly.

‘I know Dad's death was an awful shock to her, but he led her such a life, that I thought
she'd start to relax by now,' Gracie told Lizzie Jennings.

‘It often happens,' the neighbour said sagely. ‘You may have thought they didn't get on, Gracie, but all married couples find their own pattern of living, and this was theirs. Now that he's gone, she misses his tantrums and his yelling. They may have been a long time past the lovey-dovey stage, but I remember what it was like when my old man passed over. Me and him never had a good word to say about one another, but when he went it was like losing my right arm.'

She made it sound like an exclusive sisterhood to which only widows belonged, and Gracie supposed that was exactly what it was. You couldn't understand it because you had never experienced it. She shivered, knowing that she didn't want to, either.

‘Is Percy Hill pestering you, Gracie?' Lizzie said out of the blue. ‘I've seen him in the street more than usual lately.'

‘He's called in a few times apart from collecting the rent to enquire after Mum. I suppose he's only being considerate.'

Lizzie snorted. ‘Considerate, my aunt Fanny! He knows damn well that your mum's days are numbered, and once you're left on your own he'll have his eyes on more than this house if you know what I mean.'

‘I don't want to talk about it, Mrs Jennings, and I wish you wouldn't keep reminding me. I'm sure it's all nonsense, anyway.'

She was referring to Percy Hill, but she also didn't need reminding about her mother's condition. It was becoming all too clear to her that Queenie was a very sick woman and that she was unlikely to last out the time the doctor had suggested.

‘Just remember that all you have to do is knock on the wall when you need me,' Lizzie said, taking no offence.

She didn't say ‘if', just ‘when', and since they both knew it anyway, Gracie nodded, feeling her heart heavy.

She was too busy caring for her mother and continuing with her sewing jobs to worry about anything else. There was no other money coming in now, and the insurance policy on her dad's life would dwindle away soon enough, so she needed the work to keep up the payments on the rent.