Birmingham Rose (44 page)

Rose frowned at her to shut her up. ‘Look,’ she went on. ‘If you’ll say you’re going to try and find a job, I’ll help you. There’s a few going round here – and if you promise you’re not going to go fooling about looking up all your old pals who’re no good for you, I’ll have you to live with us. Hilda can move down to sleep with me. You can pay me a bit of rent and I can always do with someone else about to help with Alfie and that. But just you watch yourself.’ She wagged a warning finger in front of George’s face. ‘Any sign of trouble, of anything, and you’re out. Right?’

George nodded in silence.

‘You’d better get your lodger off home Rose,’ Grace told her. ‘I’m late with the tea already and what there is is only enough for two.’

George picked up his meagre bundle of possessions and slunk out with Rose across the yard to Moonstruck House. They were both well aware that other eyes were on them from the windows.

‘Never thought you’d end up here, Rose,’ George said as they went through the door. ‘Thought you had ideas well above this place.’

‘When did having ideas ever do anyone any good?’ She felt completely deflated after her euphoric mood earlier. She turned to Alfie, ignoring George’s horrified expression as he set eyes on him.

‘You remember my brother George? He’s coming to lodge with us for as long as he can keep his nose clean.’ Then more kindly she said to George. ‘I s’pose you’re hungry. I’ll get something on in a minute.’

Hilda, who was sitting near her father, gazed at George with interested eyes. She liked men: they picked her up and paid her attention and played games with her. ‘Is he a real brother?’

‘My brother. Your uncle.’

‘This is your kid?’ George asked astonished. Though Rose had told him what Hilda was getting up to on her visits, the child had never progressed further than babyhood in his mind.

‘This is Hilda.’

Hilda was standing in her little flowery frock, lips pursed ready to give George a kiss. Rose watched her brother’s confusion. Any such display of affection was something unusual enough in their family, and to George was a part of life long forgotten. Kissing a child was something he could barely imagine how to do. Slowly he bent down until he was level with Hilda, who popped a kiss on his cheek. As he stood up she rubbed her lips. ‘You’ve got prickly cheeks, like Grandad,’ she said. ‘But I’m glad you’re coming to live with us, Uncle George.’

‘What’re you doing here?’

The moment Rose opened the door of Moonstruck House she felt herself tense up, infuriated. George was supposed to be out at work, at yet another of the jobs she had found for him. Instead, he was just sitting there, smoking.

‘I asked you a question.’

‘Oh, don’t go on. You get to sound like her over there.’ He nodded in the direction of number five.

Rose was almost afraid to hear his reasons for being at home at this time. Had she wasted yet more time and energy helping him to find a job which he had either just walked out of or got the sack from for idleness and bad timekeeping?

In the end he said, ‘Couldn’t stand that bloody place. Got on me nerves. I thought bugger it and came home.’

‘Got on your nerves!’ Rose flared up at him. ‘You’re an idle little sod, that’s what you are!’

She strode over to him furiously and snatched the cigarette from between his fingers. ‘And you can put that bloody fag out and all. This is my house, and if you’re living here you do as I say.’

‘Leave me alone, can’t you?’ George snapped back.

Rose went to the window and flung it open, throwing the stub of cigarette, still burning, out on to the ground.

‘Uncle George is going to buy me a bicycle,’ Hilda chimed in from by the fireplace.

Rose swung round. ‘And pigs might fly.’

After George had slammed out of the house, Rose went up to her bedroom. She felt despair wash through her, as strong as any she had experienced since her first days back at home after the war. The summer afternoon air drifted in through the window, and she could hear children shouting and laughing in the courts around them. The long, lonely evening stretched ahead of her.

Tears began to slide down her face. She lay face down on her bed and let them come on like a child. For so long she had been so busy, so driven by all the necessities in her life that there had been no time to think about anything. She found herself remembering her first meeting with Diana, and the dress with the pink sprigs of roses. How much hope she had had in those days!

Even lately she had persisted in believing that if she tried hard enough things would come right in the end. God knows, she had made enough effort with George. She had goaded him on day after day to look for work. And when she could manage to find the time, she walked the streets herself on his behalf, even in her own dinner breaks. Finding him a job was not especially easy, though there was plenty of work to be had. She saw vacancies for toolmakers, die-sinkers, stampers, rivet-makers and a whole host of other skills. But George had no skills.

The only jobs he was able to get were of the most menial; the unskilled, heavy work of stacking and loading and cleaning up after those doing the better-paid jobs. The money was never up to much and George had neither the application nor the staying power to stick to the work. Rose knew, and feared, that he could make easier and quicker money elsewhere.

‘Why can’t you give it a bit more time?’ she’d implore him when feeling more patient. ‘Can’t you try a bit more than you do?’

Usually he’d just shrug off her questions, her encouragement. Once he turned to her and said, ‘Give it a rest will you, Rosie? I’m no good for anything, so just don’t keep on.’ And she’d seen a wooden, beaten expression in his eyes.

But she had still believed, naïvely, that given a few more chances, a bit of help, he could go back to being someone more like the old, sparky George she had known as a child.

She heard the door downstairs open and voices. It was Grace. Since she had spent so much time looking after Alfie, she still kept up a slightly proprietorial air over his care and was always popping in to check things were being done properly.

‘Where’s your mother got to?’ Rose heard her say to Hilda, before shouting up the stairs.

‘Be down in a mo,’ Rose called back, trying to make her voice sound normal and not weepy.

Grace stood leaning up against the sink in the little scullery that was still filled with gloom despite the bright sunlight and echoing summer sounds from outside. She had her hair wrapped up in a scarf as usual and wore her shabby brown skirt and flat, sloppy shoes. She looked as if she might be well on in years compared with Rose, who was still smartly dressed from work in her floral skirt and pink blouse, although she had taken off her heels to lie down.

‘Coming round to my way of thinking, are you?’

Rose nodded miserably in reply.

‘I warned you. You could’ve saved yourself the bother. You know who’s sniffing round here again, don’t you? Ronnie Grables.’

Silently Rose got on with peeling potatoes.

‘Did you hear me?’

‘He wouldn’t. Not after all this.’ Her secret fears about George seemed to be being confirmed one by one.

Grace let out a harsh, cynical laugh. ‘None so blind as them as won’t see,’ she said. ‘How do you know what he’d do? You don’t know where he is now or what he’s doing, do you?’

That evening she sat down with a new copy of
Corriera della Sera.
Alfie was asleep. Rose looked across at him. His face was moist with perspiration. It seemed so strange, him lying there and her in a tussle with this language she might never have any proper chance to speak again.

Why she carried on with it she wasn’t even sure. After her initial enthusiasm at Mr Abel’s offer, she had had to ask herself, who was she kidding?

At first she found the reading a terrible struggle. And she felt triumphant when she managed to make sense of short sentences, then longer ones, and gradually whole paragraphs. But tonight she was finding it hard to concentrate. She was very unsettled and anxious. It was partly because of George, of course. He had not come back for the evening meal and was still out somewhere. Doing what? Who with? Her mind followed him anxiously out into the streets.

And there had been an incident at work which had in a strange way brought her a little closer to her odd colleague Ella Crosby, and yet at the same time she felt depressed because of it.

It had dawned on Rose only gradually that Ella Crosby was in love with Mr Waters. At first she thought she was reading the signs wrong. Of course a secretary looked up at her boss with attentiveness when he came in to give her some work. But surely not always with the gaze of hungry pain that Miss Crosby directed at Mr Waters? Say something to me, it seemed to say. Just one extra thing which is not on the subject of work and which shows me you even notice me! But the longer she worked there, Rose found the situation at first unbelievable, then pitiful. She began to warm to Miss Crosby for that, if for no other reason.

That morning the two of them had been working hard at their typewriters with a stack of papers in front of them when Mr Waters’ door opened. Miss Crosby and Rose both looked up.

Mr Waters was very tall, almost unhealthily thin-looking, with such sallow, papery skin that when Rose first saw him she had thought immediately of the cemetery at Naples. He was carrying a sheaf of papers in his left hand, and Rose saw Miss Crosby’s cheeks turn a deeper red under all the powder as he laid them down rather impatiently in front of her.

‘I’m sorry, Miss Crosby,’ he said. As always he was polite, but there was a tetchy edge to his voice. ‘I’m afraid we really can’t send them out like this. They’ll all have to be done from scratch. Rather a waste of time, of course. Still, I’ll leave them with you. I know you’ll do your best.’ Without another word, he drifted back into his office again.

And to her horror, Rose saw Miss Crosby bring her hands convulsively up to her face, and she realized the woman was trying to hide approaching tears. She could feel her pain and embarrassment across the room. Rose wondered what to do. She decided to carry on typing for a while to give the woman time to recover.

Eventually, when she could see that Miss Crosby had regained some of her control, she stood up and said carefully, ‘Never blooming satisfied, are they? D’you fancy a cup of tea?’

Miss Crosby nodded.

Rose was saddened by this. Did no one ever love the right person, she wondered? Were so many people really doomed to spend their lives longing and wishing and never happy?

She got up to check on Alfie and Hilda and brewed herself a last cup of tea for the night. She felt so tired that she was tempted to stop reading. But if she did stop, then what? On this night in particular she would start thinking and brooding. As she had been reading Italian she would find Falcone insistent in her mind and she did not want her emotions disturbed again.

She was settled in bed beside Hilda’s warm body and already drifting off to sleep that night when she was aware of George coming back into the house, his loud, thoughtless tread on the stairs up to the attic. It had not long struck eleven o’clock. Rose closed her eyes and turned to lie with her back against Hilda. Where he had been and what he had been doing were not things she wanted to think about now either.

As the months went by things did not improve. George gave up any pretence that he was going to try and hold down any sort of job and yet Rose could not bring herself to throw him out. He came and went, back to his old pattern of disappearing for days at a time, paying her odds and sods of rent but nothing regular. She never knew where he was and she worried and Hilda sulked and was unsettled. But there was no trouble as such, no police round, nothing that she could actually hold up in front of him. Only the constant anxiety and suspicion which left her feeling worn down and angry.

Alfie’s health was an increasing strain. Grace came and helped them often again now, apparently glad to be back in her role as nurse. Alfie went through chest infection after chest infection, his weakened body wracked by terrible coughing. Time and again she got for him the new wonder medicine – antibiotics, which fought off the infection for a time before it returned again, apparently stronger and more tenacious than before. She was mystified by his strength, how he managed to keep going after all these months. For what, she often wondered guiltily. What reason does he have to live any more?

As the autumn wore on and the days closed in, dark, and often foggy and wet, she was finding it hard to hide her strain and exhaustion at work. Her face looked pale and sunken and she was bone thin. Both Laurence Abel and Ella Crosby noticed.

‘Is there something worrying you?’ Miss Crosby asked one afternoon when Rose was yawning over her typewriter and struggling to keep her head clear. ‘You don’t seem quite yourself.’ She blushed slightly, unaccustomed to trying to extract confidences from others.

It was a relief to tell her.

‘It’s my husband. He’s very bad. I’ve been up a lot nights.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Miss Crosby said rather stiffly. She suddenly felt rather moved by the pale, lovely young woman in front of her. ‘If there’s anything I can do . . .’

‘I don’t think so.’ Matter-of-factly, Rose added, ‘We don’t reckon he’s got long left. There’s not much anyone can do.’

‘I didn’t realize . . .’ Miss Crosby looked genuinely sorry. ‘I had no idea it was as bad as that.’

A kind of numbness overcame Rose, as if she could bear feeling no more. She was waiting for Alfie to die. Not because she willed it, but because she knew it must come. It was plain in his face. The nurse who came in tutted and said so in hushed tones as well. And now life was strung between these nights of waiting, watching his struggle with his weak, helpless body.

One December evening when she had finished work, she walked home from the bus stop in a wet dusk. The wheels of cars and buses hissed through the puddles, and she could hear the soft, rhythmic sound of windscreen wipers even over the engines. The red lights of the cars seemed to glow more warmly in the rain.