Angel of the North (27 page)

‘I know. Don’t take him seriously, he’s only pulling your leg,’ Marie said. After a turn round the floor she realized that her toes weren’t being trodden on quite
as often. ‘You know, George, Nancy’s right. I think you are beginning to get the hang of it.’

‘Oh, I’m determined to learn,’ he said. ‘Absolutely determined. I’m going to book myself in for some private coaching.’

‘Just try and relax a bit more, listen to the rhythm of the music, and let it flow through you.’

George took the advice to heart. With coaching from Marie and Nancy, and encouragement from Terry, he made steady progress, and the evening passed quite harmoniously.

‘I don’t suppose you’d fancy coming dancing with me now and again, Marie?’ Terry asked as they left the hall. Glancing down at her engagement ring, he added:
‘Strictly as pals, I mean. No prowling.’

‘Well, as long as that’s understood, I wouldn’t mind,’ she said. ‘But it will be strictly as pals.’

As he’d said himself, Charles was no poet, but he wasn’t a bad correspondent. Since Marie and her mother had been bombed out, she’d had three or four letters
from him for every one she’d sent. She reread his latest on Sunday, the day after the dinner dance. It was the usual cheery letter, full of news about life at base, observations on the men
around him, and ended as always by telling her to listen to the wireless because he kept putting in requests for her, and how much he longed to get back to her. She sometimes wondered how that
could be when he seemed to be having such a good time where he was. She wrote a long letter back, determined to make it as optimistic as his, and included a reassuring account of her outing to the
City Hall.

Marie travelled back from the hospital with her mother and helped to carry her into the Maltbys’ front room on an ambulance chair. ‘Her heart’s quite weak, but
we can’t do any more for her, I’m afraid,’ the doctor had warned. George arrived home from work just as the ambulance left. Marie elevated her mother’s ankle, still in the
plaster, and Auntie Edie fussed around arranging cushions to make her comfortable.

She sank gratefully back against them. ‘Our Marie thinks I shouldn’t trouble you. She says it’ll be too much for you, you being nearly blind. I told her, you’re not
nearly blind.’

‘We’ll manage. We’ll manage together, Lillian. I’m a bit short-sighted, but you’ll be my eyes, when George is out.’

‘Well, give it a trial,’ Marie said, with no great hopes that they would manage, since apart from her heart condition, her mother looked as if she’d aged twenty years in the
past month. ‘If it’s too much for you, we’ll have to make other arrangements. Mrs Elsworth has offered us one of their big bedrooms.’

‘I don’t want to go to the Elsworths,’ her mother said. ‘I don’t know them. I know Edie’s ways, and she knows mine. I think you’re the only woman on
earth I could bear to share a house with, Edie. I’d rather stay here. This used to be your second home, Marie. Many’s the night you’ve gone to bed here, while we’ve played
cards until one o’clock in the morning, and we’ve carried you home in a blanket.’

Aunt Edie gave her a beaming smile. ‘We’ll be good company for each other when George is out.’ Turning to Marie, she added, ‘She’ll be comfortable with me, more
comfortable than anywhere else now her own home’s gone.’

‘That’s the truth. Well, Edie, I’ve never had much, as you well know, but I’m a real pauper now. I haven’t a stick of furniture left. I haven’t a roof.
I’ve no nest for my poor chicks. My husband’s dead and gone. I just thank God I’ve still got a friend.’

Their eyes met, and two pairs of work-worn hands clasped and held each other for a moment. The look of gratitude on her mother’s face, and the compassion on Edie’s, brought a lump to
Marie’s throat and tears to her eyes. George had to look away.

‘I’ll come down every day, and do anything you want done, housework, shopping, and I’ll come and help you get her up and put her to bed,’ Marie said, ‘I’ve
been to see the hospital almoner, so there should be some money soon, and I’ll stay off work as long as I can to help you. And some of the stuff at the allotment will be ready before
long.’

‘Well, I’ll help get you up, before I go to work. We’ll manage, don’t you worry,’ George assured Marie’s mother. ‘We don’t turn our backs on our
friends. Ever. We’ll see you right. I’ll have something to eat later, Mam. I’m going to get washed and changed, and then I’ll be out. I’ve booked a dancing
lesson.’

‘All right, son.’ Aunt Edie gave him a look that managed to convey pity and disgust in equal measure. It convinced Marie that she knew he was seeing Nancy again.

As soon as he’d gone Aunt Edie challenged her. ‘He thinks I don’t realize what’s going on. Did you tell your mam the filthy trick she played on him?’

‘What trick?’ her mother asked, before Marie had a chance to answer.

‘That Nancy Harding, your Marie’s friend. She chucked him for an actor, and hopped it to London with him. Now he’s chucked her. She put my lad through hell, and now she’s
back in Hull, hanging round his neck again.’

Marie escaped to the kitchen. When she returned with the tea tray Aunt Edie’s tirade against Nancy had just come to an end.

‘You ought to drop her as a friend, Marie,’ her mother said. ‘She’s not our sort at all
.
We’ve never had much money, but we’ve always been
respectable. She’s not somebody you ought to know, unless you want to be tarred with the same brush.’

Marie was dropping her latest letter to Charles in the postbox when Hannah came out of the post office.

‘Are you writing to Charles, by any chance?’

Marie’s jaw dropped. ‘What business is it of yours who I’m writing to?’

Hannah looked her up and down. ‘Well, in your next to Charles, tell him he’s going to be a daddy.’

Marie gave her a disdainful stare. ‘He’s going to be no such thing. Don’t judge everybody else by your own standards.’

‘I’m not judging
everybody
else by my standards,’ Hannah said, returning both stare and disdain, ‘only him. Just give him the message, will you?’

‘What are you insinuating?’ Marie demanded, but Hannah was already walking down Princes Avenue, and Marie had no intention of following her to bandy words in the street. Instead, she
walked furiously in the opposite direction, towards Park Avenue.

Mrs Elsworth was in, and so was Danny. The two women went for a private talk in the kitchen.

‘You know that baby of Hannah’s isn’t her husband’s, don’t you?’ Marie began.

‘Yes. I had realized that,’ Mrs Elsworth said drily.

‘Well, you know what she just said to me? “Tell Charles he’s going to be a daddy,” she said! Just like that. You know what she’s insinuating? Unless I’ve got
it all wrong, and I don’t think I have, she’s trying to pin that baby she’s having on Charles.’

Mrs Elsworth sighed, and sat down. ‘I should have sacked her the minute I suspected there was something going on, but I was so busy with the WVS and everything I kept putting it off,
I’m afraid.’

Marie looked aghast. ‘What? You’re not telling me you believe her? She’s lying! We’ve seen her out with other men – who knows who the father is? Charles could never
be tempted by somebody like her!’

‘I hope you’re right.’

‘Of course I’m right. She’s lying, I tell you! She’s lying! And you – his own mother – how can you believe her?’

Charles’s mother maintained a discreet and ominous silence.

‘Well? Do you believe her?’ Marie insisted.

‘You remember when I was questioning her the other day?’ Mrs Elsworth said, looking Marie full in the face. ‘I thought she might have told me then that it was Charles’s
baby. I dreaded hearing it, but I couldn’t stop myself from quizzing her. Now I feel drained, as if I’ve had an enormous abscess that’s burst at last.’

Danny pushed open the door and walked in. He stopped, looking from one to the other. ‘Talk about an atmosphere you could cut with a knife!’ he said. ‘What’s the
matter?’

As Marie turned towards him a dim memory of his jokes about hairgrips in Charles’s bed surfaced in her mind, along with a vision of Hannah’s abundant auburn hair, always pinned up.
Could it be true, then? Was she really having his baby? Her beautiful vision of herself, presenting Charles with his firstborn child, the first fruit of their marriage and supreme proof of her
womanhood, was dashed to the ground. It had been her fondest hope, even more than taking her vows at the altar on their wedding day. Now it could never be, thanks to Hannah. Hannah had pipped her
to the post.

The bottom dropped out of Marie’s world.

Jenny was playing in the ruins of a house in Marlborough Avenue, when Marie passed on her way to Nancy’s. It took nearly ten minutes to coax her out, and when she had,
Marie decided to kill two birds with one stone. She would take Jenny back home, and have it out with Hannah, straight. But Hannah wasn’t in, and a neighbour who called to her from across the
street to tell her so got the full blast of Marie’s anger about Jenny being left alone to get herself into danger.

‘Hannah! She’s not fit to have a child,’ Marie ended.

‘Her father’s family live just off Hessle Road, Scarborough Street, number twelve,’ the woman volunteered. ‘Take her there if you’re so concerned. She might stand a
chance of being looked after there.’

‘Right, then, come on, Jenny, we’re going to see your grandma. If you see her mother, just tell her where she is, will you?’

‘I certainly will,’ the woman nodded.

Charles wouldn’t approve of such interference, Marie thought, as she walked off holding Jenny’s hand. Well, to hell with Charles. It was obvious now why he hadn’t wanted to
interfere in Hannah’s business on the night she’d come home with that soldier, and smacked Jenny into the middle of the street. He hadn’t wanted his own dirty little secret coming
to light, and Hannah might just have trotted it out for all to hear. Marie glowed with anger. She was absolutely shameless, that woman. Absolutely without shame.

‘You’re walking too fast,’ Jenny said, breathlessly trying to keep up.

Marie slowed her pace as they walked along Spring Bank and down Albert Avenue. When they passed the baths, she thought of George, searching in there among a lot of battered corpses, trying to
find Nancy. What a nightmare that must have been, poor lad, and how had Nancy treated him? Left him without a word. Without a thought, even, except she remembered to take all his savings with
her.

‘My dad brings me here,’ Jenny said.

‘What, to the baths?’

‘Sometimes. But he brings me this way when we go to my nanna’s.’

‘Doesn’t your mother ever bring you?’

‘No.’

They walked in silence then until they came to Scarborough Street. Jenny left her side then and ran down the street, to hammer on her grandmother’s door. When it opened, Jenny flung
herself into a woman’s arms, to be lifted and hugged – by a woman as fair as Jenny herself, who bore more resemblance to her than her mother did, and who had obviously been crying.
Marie instinctively liked her.

‘I found her playing in the ruins of a house on Marlborough Avenue. Those places aren’t safe. There’s so much rubble, you wouldn’t even know if there was an unexploded
bomb. It’s not the first time, either. She’ll end up breaking her neck, if somebody doesn’t watch her. I tried taking her back home, but her mother was out.’

The woman showed not the slightest surprise. ‘Well, just fancy that. Come in. You go into the kitchen, Jenny, love. Go and get a biscuit, while I talk to the lady.’

When Jenny was out of earshot, she closed the adjoining door and turned to Marie. ‘We’ve had a terrible upsetment,’ she said, with tears springing to her eyes. ‘Her
dad’s been reported missing, presumed dead. The ship he was in copped a torpedo. Of course, Hannah got the letter the Ministry of War sent, but she didn’t bother telling us.
“Recorded as supposed drowned whilst on service with his ship,” it said. ‘His name’s going on the roll of honour of men who gave their lives for their country, as if
that’s any consolation to me. We got the news third-hand, days after.’

‘Jenny’s dad? Your son?’ Marie said, the wind completely taken out of her sails.

The woman nodded, and her face crumpled. She fished a damp handkerchief out of her apron pocket to dab her sore and swollen eyelids and blow her nose. ‘We only heard a couple of days ago,
and I’ve hardly stopped crying since. In his last letter, he told me, “Watch out for my Jenny,” as if he’d had a premonition. And I’ve been trying to watch out for
Jenny since he went away, I really have. But if I arrange to go and see her, Hannah makes sure she’s out. And if I call unexpectedly, it’s not convenient, because they’re going
out, or they’re expecting company. There’s always some excuse. That’s the sort of game she plays. You’re not a friend of hers, are you?’

‘No, I am not. I live . . . lived on the same street, that’s all.’

‘We don’t get on, me and Hannah, as you might have gathered. None of the family can stand her. None of us have any more to do with her than we have to, for our Larry’s sake. I
don’t know how many blokes she’s got off with, since the war started. She’s a disgrace. She thinks I know nothing, but I get to know it all, from somebody I know who lives
opposite her. Now she’s expecting again. It can’t be our Larry’s, and I’m glad it’s not. I shouldn’t like to think she had another of his bairns, and him not
there to look out for it.’