Birmingham Rose (43 page)

‘Go and give Mary some of your time,’ she told him as they released each other. ‘And your kids. They’re what matters. If you stick with them I bet things’ll work out.’

Michael kissed her. ‘I hope you get that job of yours. I’ll miss you.’

She told him she would walk back alone and he let her out of the office and the door on to the street.

She was late home again. Grace was sitting in her usual position by Alfie’s bed. The fire had burned down to a glow in the grate, and beside Grace lay a long skein of knitting which she had abandoned out of sleepiness.

She said nothing when Rose came in through the door, but her whole manner spoke of reproach. She bundled her things into the cloth bag and placed it pointedly beside the door. Still in silence the two of them settled Alfie down for the night. Usually they talked and made tea while Alfie dozed, but tonight he lay watching them as they went about their tasks, their eyes not meeting each other’s nor a word passing between them.

They re-dressed his sores, though this time the sheets had stayed dry and did not need to be changed. When he started coughing again they supported him between them by his skeletal shoulders and dosed him with linctus, waiting until he was calm again.

Eventually Rose asked Grace, ‘D’you want a cuppa?’

‘No ta.’ Grace took her apron off. ‘I’ll be glad to get home to my bed. And not before time either.’ Rose could hear the anger pressed into her voice.

‘By the way. I’m stopping the classes. I’m ready to go for a better job now.’

Normally Grace would have looked pleased for her and asked questions about where and how much. ‘That’ll be a relief for everyone, won’t it?’

Rose sighed. ‘I can be home evenings.’

Grace continued to look huffy, busying herself with her bag. ‘Well – we’ll see about that, won’t we?’

Then she was gone.

Rose boiled some water on the gas and made tea. She poured for herself and Alfie and helped him, spooning the sweet liquid into his mouth. Often when she came in he was sleepy and hardly seemed to notice she was there. But tonight he was wide awake, partly perhaps because of his troubled breathing. She knew he was watching her as she moved round, tidying away the cups and getting the room ready for the morning because it was always such a rush.

She went over to him. ‘Would you like me to turn you again? Would it help you to breathe better?’

‘No. I’m OK.’ He carried on staring up at her. His gaze seemed to hold a knowing sort of wisdom which made her feel ashamed. In the end she could bear it no longer.

‘What? What, Alfie?’

In his stumbling, slurred way he brought out the words, ‘Wanted . . . something . . . more than . . . half alive . . . did you?’

She knelt and laid her head down on the bed next to the thin curve of his body. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so sorry.’

For a moment he managed to stroke her hair before his arm went into spasm again.

‘You deserve . . . better,’ he said. When she looked up at him she saw he was crying too.

‘I’m going to be here now,’ she told him. ‘Evenings and all. I’m going to get a better job and work hard – for all of us. I’ll make things better if I can.’

She took one of his stiff hands in her own. ‘Grace makes you a better wife than I do, doesn’t she?’

She looked into Alfie’s wet face, and reached across to wipe away his tears.

‘But you’re . . . the wife . . . I want. Always. You know. I love . . . you.’

George Lucas stood outside the entrance to Winson Green Prison for the first time in over four years and heard the heavy gate shudder behind him. He stood for a moment or two in the overcast March morning, turning his pinched face this way and that, trying to take in the fact that after all these months he could make choices about his own movements. He appeared weighed down by the responsibility of it.

He looked even thinner after his time inside, giving the impression that he had grown taller, like a plant that has bolted up in poor light, and his skin had a yellowish, waxy look. Under his arm he carried a small bundle of the few possessions he had with him when he went into prison, and these he carried wrapped in a strip of white towelling. With his old, threadbare jacket pulled close round him and a crushed-looking brown felt hat pulled over his cropped hair, he began to walk slowly away from the prison in the direction of Birch Street.

The same morning Rose made her way into the middle of Birmingham. She stopped at the entrance to some narrow offices squeezed in near the bottom end of Temple Street. Screwed to the wall beside the heavy wooden door was a brass plaque which read, ‘
LAURENCE ABEL AND MATTHEW WATERS
:
SOLICITORS
’.

Rose checked there were no stray bits of fluff on the full navy blue skirt she was wearing, and adjusted the collar of her white blouse, relieved they wouldn’t be able to see the mend in the right sleeve under her thick navy cardigan. On her head she wore a little felt hat with a narrow brim in a royal blue which looked striking against her jackdaw hair and, to finish off the outfit, some high-heeled black shoes. She wished the shoes had been navy as well, but the neighbours had rallied round to help her out and lend her clothes for her interview and she had had to take what she could get. She peered at her faint reflection in the window of the corridor leading to the office. Nothing seemed to be amiss, so she patted the hat gently and said in a whisper, ‘Come on, Rose Meredith. Get yourself in there.’

She was precisely on time. When the door opened she found she was facing a tall blonde woman of about forty with an immaculately made-up face, who looked at her appraisingly and then held out her hand with what Rose could only feel was disdain.

‘Good morning. Mrs Meredith?’ The ‘Mrs’ was definitely unenthusiastic. ‘I’m Miss Crosby.’

Miss Crosby had a small outer area to work in off which led the two offices of Mr Waters and Mr Abel. Each had a slim wooden sign on his door. Miss Crosby sat down behind her heavy black Olivetti with an affected caress of the back of her skirt. Every hair on her head sat in precisely the right place.

Brassy cow, Rose found herself thinking.

‘You have a very satisfactory recommendation from Sparkhill Commercial School,’ Miss Crosby said. ‘Your shorthand and typing speeds are well within our requirements. Have you kept them up?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘I’ve only just left the school.’

The woman’s stony blue eyes watched her coldly. ‘You’ve been employed as an invoice typist in the pool of a small firm. Do you really imagine you’re capable of taking a job as a personal assistant to a professional solicitor?’ She spoke the words ‘personal assistant’ as if the position was second only to membership of the royal family.

‘I think I can do the job,’ Rose told her. ‘I’ve got good speeds, I’m well organized and I’m a very good worker.’

‘Perhaps I should make it clear what is required here. I have been secretary to Mr Waters, the senior partner, for several years. It is only in the past month that he has gone into partnership with Mr Abel, who has come to join us from Manchester. Mr Waters will be retiring in a couple of years – that’s why Mr Abel is now named first in the practice.’

Rose had the definite impression that Miss Crosby’s nose had been put out of joint by all these changes.

‘Mr Abel needs his own personal assistant, since I am fully occupied with all Mr Waters’ affairs. If we were to take you on – and I have my doubts as to whether you’d be up to it, quite honestly, Mrs Meredith – you would be working under me. Is that clear?’

Rose nodded. ‘Do I have to be seen by Mr Abel?’

‘Oh, that won’t be necessary,’ Miss Crosby told her briskly. ‘Mr Waters and Mr Abel leave all that sort of thing to me.’

Miss Crosby seemed on the point of pronouncing one way or another as to Rose’s prospects with Abel and Waters when one of the inner doors opened and an energetic figure bounded out of the office. Rose saw a man with a round, cheerful face wearing a suit which looked good quality but was somehow comically ill-fitting on him, who bustled across the room, a newspaper tucked loosely under one arm.

‘No, no, don’t get up,’ he said. ‘I’m Laurence Abel. So, Miss Crosby, is this my new secretary or do you have a whole line of others waiting breathlessly outside?’

‘I was just discussing with Mrs Meredith whether she is really suitably qualified for the position.’

Just then their interviewee, who had been looking anxiously up at Mr Abel, let out a loud gasp. Rose’s hand rose automatically to her mouth to apologize for the sound.

‘What’s the matter, Mrs Meredith?’ Laurence Abel joked. ‘Is my presence too much for you?’

‘I’m sorry. It’s just – you’ll think I’m very odd, but I noticed your newspaper.’

Laurence Abel frowned as if he had forgotten he was carrying the thing. He pulled it out and spread it out on the desk. It was a copy of
Corriera della Sera
.

‘It’s Italian,’ Rose explained unnecessarily.

Miss Crosby was looking at her as if she thought Rose had lost her mind. But she had Laurence Abel’s avid attention.

‘I used to speak it.’ Rose glanced anxiously at Miss Crosby. ‘I was there for nearly two years. In the war.’

‘Good Lord!’ Mr Abel cried. Rose was almost sure his feet left the ground in his enthusiasm. ‘How marvellous! You mean you really speak it? Can you remember it?’

Suddenly he launched into a list of questions, mostly in energetic Italian, but with the odd English word thrown in when he got stuck. Having heard Rose’s replies he said, ‘You’re obviously a darn sight better at it than I am. Come on into my office for a minute.’

He led her into what seemed a surprisingly orderly room for so chaotic-looking a character: the walls lined with shelves of all his files and reference books with gold lettering on the spines.

‘You know, I really should be working,’ Mr Abel said, leaning back at his desk, his podgy stomach pushing out the front of his shirt. ‘But I can’t throw up an opportunity like this.’

Rose found herself telling him about the ATS and a little about Il Rifugio and her feeling that she belonged in the country.

‘I know what you mean about the sense of belonging,’ Mr Abel agreed eagerly. ‘I had exactly the same feeling. I go back as often as I can. Couldn’t do without it.’

‘You go back?’ Rose was amazed. She never imagined such a thing. Italy was part of the war, not accessible at any other time.

‘About once a year. Managed a quick visit before moving down here. It’s not quite the other side of the world you know.’

‘It is when you’ve got no money.’

Laurence Abel looked at her in silence for a moment. ‘If you came to work here, would you agree on a condition that when we’re not actually dictating letters, we’ll speak in Italian?’

Rose grinned at this bizarre request. ‘That’d be lovely.’

*

She almost danced into number five that evening to tell Grace the news.

‘I’ve got the job!’ she cried before she was even properly through the door.

And then stopped abruptly. Grace was standing by the table wearing her apron and a grimmer, angrier expression than Rose could ever remember seeing on her face before. Sid was sitting on the other side of the room by the fire, but was for once intent on what was going on. And at the table sat George, his hat lying in front of him, a cigarette in his mouth, his defiant eyes staring down at the table.

‘Oh my God,’ Rose said. ‘I’d forgotten it was today.’

‘That’s obvious,’ George said bitterly. He pulled the cigarette out of his mouth, wincing as if it tasted bad and held it in one hand, tapping his fingers on the table.

‘Well – what’s going on?’ Rose asked. The atmosphere was pure acid.

‘He thinks,’ Grace’s voice grated out, ‘that he’s going to come swanning back in here to live as if nothing had happened – and have me waiting on him hand and foot again no doubt. And then’ – she leaned down and shouted into George’s face – ‘I s’pose you’ll just be off thieving and getting into more trouble and expecting the rest of us to carry the can for you! No. I’m not having it. I’m not having you back here. You can go where you like, go to hell for all I care, as long as you’re not coming in and out of here.’

George sat in silence. He had walked most of the day, with no money for food as he made his way home, putting off going to the old house where he had grown up, skirting round it time and again, until by the afternoon he was so hungry and weary from the unaccustomed exercise that he had finally slunk into the court.

Sid had opened the door and when it dawned on him who had arrived, he said, ‘You’d better come in, but I don’t know what your sister’ll say.’ He’d let him have tea and bread and jam and a slice off a leathery bit of leftover beef.

Rose could tell that, for all his toughness, George was upset. She was horrified at what she was hearing from Grace. Grace hadn’t been to see him once in prison and was turning him out now as if he was a stranger who meant nothing to her at all.

No one had spoken after Grace, but she leapt to her own defence as if they had, her hands clamped to her waist. ‘Say what you like. You come in here and I go – simple as that. You can go rot for all I care.’

George looked over at Sid for some sign of authority, of contradiction, but saw only his father’s watery eyes staring defeatedly back at him.

Sid shrugged tiredly. ‘You’d better do as she says.’ He couldn’t have Grace walking out on him, after all.

George.’ Rose spoke more gently and he was struck even at that moment by the difference between his sisters: Rose’s animated beauty despite her thinness, compared with Grace’s haggard, bitter face.

Rose laid her hand on the back of his chair. ‘What are you going to do, George? Find a job and get yourself straightened out or what? You can’t go on the way you’ve been. You don’t want to end up back in there, do you?’ She looked with pity at the side of her brother’s face with his shorn brown hair. He was a sad sight.

‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘What can I do?’

‘Never done a straight day’s work in your life.’ Grace’s voice drilled on into him. ‘Come as too much of a shock to you, wouldn’t it?’