Birmingham Rose (36 page)

Hilda was now looking up at Rose with eyes that were the image of her father’s, and though her face was flushed she was quiet, as if listening to them both. Rose stepped over the pile of filthy clothes her husband had left lying carelessly on the floor and went towards the kitchen.

‘Spuds should be ready by now.’

She laid her wakeful four-month-old down to kick on a blanket in the little living room next to the kitchen. Then she went through and strained the potatoes and mashed them without any milk. After all, there was gravy. Something was always in short supply it seemed, and at the moment it was milk. As she pushed the masher through the potatoes, Hilda began to cry again.

Rose stood still, closing her eyes. The cries grew louder and more agitated until Hilda sounded as if the whole universe must be collapsing around her. Rose slammed the lid on the potatoes and marched into the living room.

‘What d’you want?’ she demanded roughly. Hilda was already in such a state that sweat glistened on her pink skin. Sometimes she screamed for so long and so vigorously that her fine brown hair became drenched and stringy.

Rose picked her up.

‘Why can’t you just be quiet?’ she shouted. ‘For God’s sake stop this sodding racket. There’s nothing to scream about.’

‘Don’t talk to her like that.’ Alfie came in behind her, still smoothing Brylcreem into his wayward hair. ‘Here – give her to me. That’s no way to talk to a babby.’

‘Well,
you
’d soon yell at her if you had it all day!’ Rose screeched at him. ‘You can’t even stand five minutes of it when it’s your precious sleep she’s breaking into!’

It was true. Alfie would mumble drowsily, ‘Can’t you do something with her?’ as Rose hurried out of bed in the night. She felt permanently tired and foggy in the head. The days seemed to swim around her, shapeless, busy, but tedious. She had no spare energy to do anything but care for Hilda’s needs, and for Alfie’s, and to take a quick nap in the odd half-hours that Hilda slept during the day.

Mrs Meredith, on her occasional visits from Small Heath to see her granddaughter, was kind and fussing and full of unwanted advice.

‘If you have a happy mother, you get a happy child,’ she told Rose one day, her plump little frame perched on one of their two old chairs. Rose, hollow-eyed, sat staring at her, hardly listening.

‘Your job is to pull yourself together and look a bit more cheerful,’ she said. ‘Then the babby’ll soon perk up, you’ll see if she don’t.’

Rose did feel everything was all her fault. She had selfishly had a child by a man she didn’t really love and everyone was suffering.

Now Alfie was walking round the little square of garden in the late afternoon sun, with Hilda in his arms. Rose sat down and burst into tears. She cried a lot nowadays, and Alfie, at first sympathetic, was growing rather impatient.

‘What’s up with you?’ he’d ask. ‘You’ve got a nice home, and a bonny babby. What more can I give you?’

Then he’d assume that protective, fatherly air which made her want to scream with frustration. But she could not break through it without saying things which would have been far crueller than he deserved.

After a while he came in with Hilda dozing in his arms, went through and laid her in her cot. He kissed Rose on the cheek. ‘Come on Rosie, that’s me girl. Let’s see a smile out of you, eh?’

Rose turned her mouth up into a guilty smile.

‘That’s more like it,’ Alfie said. ‘Now – how about some of that stew?’

The stew had cooked too long and the carrots were mushy, but Alfie shovelled the food down without comment. Rose watched him gratefully. He was as uncritical over her cooking as he was over housework, not seeming to notice whether she’d done much or not.

‘So,’ she said. ‘How did you get this job then?’

Alfie looked at her with a rather sheepish expression on his pale face. ‘It was just – well, a bloke Eddie knows.’

Rose rolled her eyes upwards. ‘Might’ve known he must’ve had something to do with it.’

‘Look, he’s all right. I keep telling you.’ Alfie forked his last mouthful of potato into his mouth. ‘He’s on the level, honest he is. He just has the contacts, that’s all.’

‘Alfie,’ Rose said emphatically, ‘Eddie is as on the level as Dr Crippen. He’s a horrible bloke. Why did you have to pal up with him of all people?’

Alfie looked across the table at his wife’s thin, tired face. A little frown line was beginning to form between her dark eyebrows. He loved Rose, proudly and loyally, and knew that he always would. But he couldn’t hide from himself the fact that she’d changed, that his affection for her was stronger than hers for him. He could live with that, provided she was there for him. What was harder was this sharpness, the way she was so critical of people. She hadn’t been like that before the war. Tart as an acid drop now.

‘If I get this job, money and all, I don’t s’pose you’ll want to moan about that, will you?’ he said, sarcastically.

Rose looked at him in silence, refusing to be drawn. ‘If you want the job, then you’ll do it. Not up to me, is it?’

‘No,’ Alfie agreed. ‘It isn’t.’

As she was pouring the boiling water into the teapot after their meal, Rose heard a hasty tap on the glass of the back door. She opened it into the dusk, the air still warm.

Grace was standing on the step, her hand still raised to knock. ‘There’s trouble,’ she said grimly. ‘It’s George. He’s been arrested.’

Rose gasped. ‘What the hell for?’

‘There was a big job last week. One of the warehouses over Bordesley way. They had parts in there for one of the bigger firms. I don’t know if it was the Austin or what. But it was done over. They shifted a whole load of stuff and one of the blokes had a gun on him. George was in on it.’

‘No!’ Rose protested. ‘He wouldn’t. Even George wouldn’t go that far, surely.’

‘Oh wake up, Rose,’ Grace snapped. ‘George is as crooked as a bent half-crown – has been for years. I always hoped the army’d straighten him out, but he’s come back even worse. Since he’s been with that spiv Ronnie Grables he’s turned professional. He’ll have been in on it, no two ways.’

Rose banged the teapot down hard on the wooden surface. ‘Silly little sod,’ she said. ‘What the bloody hell’s the matter with him?’

As they carried the tea through she said to Alfie, ‘I suppose you heard all that?’

‘All right, Gracie? Yes, I heard. It don’t surprise me. He’s been heading that way for a long time I reckon.’

‘Did they come round to the house to pick him up?’ Rose asked as they all sat in front of their cups.

Grace shook her head. ‘No, thank God. They found him with Ronnie somewhere.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Anyway, it’ll be the magistrates next week, and then we’ll see, won’t we?’

Rose sighed. ‘He was such a nice little kid.’

Grace shrugged. ‘Weren’t we all?’

The war had changed Grace in a number of ways. Though still only twenty-four, the skin stretched over her bony face looked aged, with the kind of lifeless greyness Rose had noticed in most of the people who had stayed in the city during the war. The sweetness which had marked her out in her teens had turned sour. Perhaps we’ll just be bitter now, Rose thought, for the rest of our lives, over what we’ve lost. And as for George, his own bitterness, his damage, had begun even earlier in the war.

Alfie pushed back his chair. ‘I’ll just go and have a walk in the garden before the light’s all gone.’

Rose smiled gratefully at him, knowing he was leaving them alone for a talk.

The two sisters sat on despondently at the table.

‘If he goes to prison,’ Rose said, ‘we’ll have lost him, sort of, won’t we?’

Grace looked dispassionately at her. ‘We lost him years ago.’

‘But he’s our brother. We can’t just turn away from him for all he’s done. We’ve got to stand by him.’

‘No,’ Grace said. ‘He ain’t our brother. Say what you like, but it’s his choosing. We’ve all done our best. I stood by him for years while you were off in the army and I’ve had enough of it. He’s made his choice in life and he can go to hell his own way.’

Rose was startled. Was this Grace, idealistic, sweet Grace? ‘Well what choices are
you
going to make then?’ she challenged her.

‘I’m going to train to be a nurse if they’ll have me. A proper one. If I’m going to have to work for the rest of my life then I might as well do a job worth doing.’

‘Does that mean you’ll be living in, at the hospital?’

‘How else am I going to get out? Dad can take care of himself when he needs to. You got out – everyone else has, one way or another. Why shouldn’t I?’

‘No—’ Rose held her hands up as if to protect herself from this onslaught of resentment. ‘You’ve got me wrong. I’m not getting at you. I think you’re right. I’ve always felt bad that you’ve been the one left taking all the flak. I think it’s just the right thing for you. In fact I . . .’ Suddenly all the frustration of her own life bubbled up. ‘I wish I could get a job. I wish I could get out and do anything except being stuck here all day long. Hilda just screams and I can’t get anything else done. And Alfie—’ She bit back the words. She could not let the truth out, even if they both knew it. Alfie bores me. I have no feelings for him. I should never have married someone so dull and calm, so kind, so limited . . .

Grace watched her sister with anger and disgust written plain on her face, as if she had sucked all the angry, guilty thoughts out of Rose’s mind.

‘You’re a silly cow, d’you know that? Never satisfied, are you? Always have to be off wanting something else than what you’ve got. D’you know what I’d give to have a kind husband and a home of my own and a babby daughter? You can’t see yourself for looking, Rose, and if you don’t pull yourself together and act a bit more like a proper wife you’re going to lose what you have got!’

Grace had not heard that Joe was dead until weeks after the war ended. A letter arrived one morning on thin, crackly blue air-mail paper from a neighbour in Peoria, Illinois, who had been drafted at the same time as Joe. Only then, once he was back in mid-western America late in the summer of 1945, had he thought to write. Grace’s hopes of a reunion with the only man she had ever given her heart to were cut to nothing.

It had happened only shortly before Rose arrived home to find what was left of her family still in Catherine Street, shrunken by loss and grief. She felt that she added nothing to it except her own restlessness, her own loss and mourning.

Since she had been one of the first group, with Gwen, to be posted at Caserta, she was also among the first batch to be sent home. Those final three months, before they began their journey across Europe, should have been the sweetest in Italy. The atmosphere had become more relaxed, and there was more opportunity for ‘jangling off’ on excursions all round the area. For Rose and many others there was a poignant sense of making the most of the warmth and the languorous beauty of the country before the goodbyes began and they all had to head back into new, possibly more difficult lives.

When Rose went for the last time to Il Rifugio, steeling herself to say goodbye to Margherita and Francesco, she found the place depleted. Apart from the one great absence in the house which made it so painful to her, Henry was gone too. He had hot-footed it out of Naples as soon as the war was over.

‘I’m sorry our home has come to be such a sad place for you,’ Margherita told her. ‘Please don’t forget us. You have been a very good friend – to me especially.’

On the very few occasions that she had seen them since May, Rose could never hold herself back from asking, ‘Have you heard from him? Have you seen him?’

‘Not a word,’ Francesco told her each time. ‘Truly. If we had I would tell you straight away. You must understand. They have to adjust to a new way, their lives are so disciplined . . .’

She had still been unable to believe it completely; to accept that he would not change his mind as he had done so often before; that he could transfer such feelings of passion into a way of life that she could not begin to understand. Some time before she left, she still hoped he would come back to her.

‘I wish I could be angry with Falcone,’ she said to Margherita.

‘It’s true he treated you badly,’ her friend said. ‘Though he did not mean harm, I’m sure.’ Margherita always tried to be fair on the motives of others. ‘But no one could blame you for being angry.’

‘I’m not, though,’ Rose said flatly. ‘I just feel . . .’ She searched round for the right word and settled for the simplest: ‘
Triste
.’ Sad. A deep, deep sadness which never seemed to leave her, which Gwen and the others attributed to her ‘failed’ relationship with Tony.

‘What will you do, Margherita?’ Rose asked. ‘Will you stay here?’

‘Of course.’ Margherita looked as calm and steady as ever. ‘And perhaps now the war is over we can persuade the Church to give us some proper backing. After all, there is no British army for us to live off now.’

‘Well, God help you,’ Rose said, without irony.

The two women stood with their arms round each other for a long time before Rose left. Magdalena and Assunta and Francesco all came and embraced her, Assunta with tears running down her kindly, cock-eyed face. When Rose handed back her key and heard the wooden door slam behind her for the last time, she held in her hands a beautiful, poignant present from Francesco: the copy of his favourite French song that they had listened to so often,
‘J’attendrai – le jour et la nuit j’attendrai toujours
– I will wait . . .’

The journey to England took them several days on trains with hard, slatted wooden seats. Rose and Gwen travelled together, exclaiming when at last they saw the Channel and the white cliffs of Dover, which they seemed to have left a whole lifetime ago, and at how lush and neat and altogether more cosy the English landscape looked than anything they had seen during their years away.

‘I say – it all looks bigger, doesn’t it?’ Gwen exclaimed as they gazed out at the Kentish orchards, and the elder and hawthorn along the railway tracks. ‘I suppose we did leave in the middle of winter, but even so, everything seems to have shot up.’