Birmingham Rose (7 page)

‘Ain’t you got any more light than this?’ she said to Rose. ‘I can hardly see what I’m doing.’

Rose swallowed down her retort that she wasn’t being paid to sit and do her knitting and went downstairs to find the small paraffin lamp that they hardly ever used.

‘How’s she getting on?’ Grace whispered. She was very pale with circles under her eyes. Violet had fallen asleep on her lap.

‘All right,’ Rose said, feeling a bit superior. ‘Shouldn’t be long now.’

When she was half-way up to the attic she wished more than ever that she could retreat back down again. She heard her mother’s cries, louder and more anguished than they had been so far. She had to force herself to climb the rest of the stairs.

‘Please don’t let me ever, ever have to do that,’ she whispered to herself. ‘I’ll work as hard as I can, I’ll get the best job I can. But don’t let me have to have babbies!’

When she reached the top the light showed her Dora kneeling now on the bed on all fours like a dog. Her head was hanging down between her shoulders and she was panting and gasping. When she heard Rose she lifted her head. Her face was soaked with sweat. Joan was still knitting complacently on the other bed.

‘There’s something wrong,’ Dora moaned.

Rose hung the lamp on a hook on the wall and went to bathe Dora’s face, her hands trembling. Her mother’s nightshirt had ridden right up at the back so her behind and legs were on view and she could see her great swollen belly and her breasts dangling beneath her as she knelt on the bed. Rose felt sweat break out all over her again as well.

‘The babby – should be – coming down, but he’s not – budging,’ Dora panted, starting to cry in desperation, moving her body restlessly on the bed. Rose made helpless movements with her hands.

‘You’ll be all right,’ Joan said, switching needles to begin on a new row. ‘Just give him a good push.’

Dora heaved again. ‘Help me – oh God, help me!’

Unable to do anything to help, Rose felt like crying herself. In the end she went to stand in front of Joan.

‘Look, you old cow,’ she shouted as Dora writhed on the bed beside them. ‘You’re s’posed to be here to help, not knit jumpers for the whole British bleeding army.’

The midwife waddled over to Dora in the shadowy light and said, ‘You’ll have to watch this one, Dora. She’s got too much of a gob on her.’

‘And you’ve got too big an arse on you,’ Rose retorted. She was suddenly feeling exhausted.

‘It’s stuck,’ Dora screamed. ‘It won’t come. Get it out, for God’s sake. It’s killing me.’

‘You ought to get a doctor,’ Rose hissed at Joan. ‘You’re not up to this.’

‘Cheeky little sod,’ Joan said. ‘I’ve done hundreds of these.’

She bent down behind Dora, breathing heavily. Rose watched, horrified, as she pushed two of her thick, lardy fingers into her mother. Dora groaned, and Rose saw frothy saliva dripping from her mouth on to the crumpled newspaper. She was making whimpering animal sounds that turned Rose’s stomach.

‘The babby’s ready all right,’ Joan said. ‘Must have an arm caught awkward.’ And with no warning she forced her entire hand up inside Dora and began to manipulate the baby inside her, trying to free it. Dora’s screams rose to a single high-pitched shriek like a creature caught in the iron teeth of a trap. Joan pulled her hand out, slimy with blood, and Rose squeezed her eyes tight and pushed her fingers into her ears, unable to stand it any longer.

When she opened her eyes a moment later, Dora was still screaming, but now it was more of a yell.

‘Now you’ve woken up you can come here and give me a hand,’ Joan said.

Still sick and dizzy, Rose just managed to peer under her mother, who was squatting again. Bulging out from her she could see the top of a little head covered in dark, wet hair.

‘I can’t – I CAN’T!’ Dora shrieked.

‘Just push,’ Joan shouted down her ear. ‘One more’ll do it.’

With an almighty cry, Dora pushed the child’s head out and Rose saw the blood spurt from her ragged vagina. Another push and the little body slithered out covered in blood and a white pasty substance. Dora collapsed forwards on to the bed.

‘What is it?’ Rose said, all her faintness of a moment before quite forgotten.

Joan’s meaty hands picked up the little body and turned it to tie the cord.

‘It’s a boy, Mom!’ Rose said, as Joan wrapped him in an old white cloth. ‘You were right.’

‘Told you,’ Dora said faintly. ‘Give him here.’ She held out her arms, the palms of her hands grey with newspaper print, and took the little boy to her. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You can go and tell your dad he’s got another son. And Rose,’ she said, as the girl headed for the stairs, ‘thanks, our kid.’

Rose wasn’t at home when it happened.

George ran across the court in his bare feet as if his breeches were on fire.

‘Mom, Mom! Come quick!’

‘What?’ Dora’s heart started pounding as she pulled off her apron. ‘
What?
Tell me.’

‘It’s our Violet,’ George panted. ‘She’s gone under a horse.’

Dora was out of the court in front of him and into the street. At the top of Catherine Street by the main road she could see a small crowd of people and she tore along the pavement towards them.

Silently they let her through as if she were royalty. She heard someone say, ‘It’s the child’s mother, the poor cow.’

A man was standing in front of his cart holding the bridle of a heavy black horse. Dora always remembered from that day the smell of the sweating animal, its damp heaving flanks in the sunlight and the stunned expression on the man’s ill-shaven face.

At his feet lay the shape of her child. Even in the few moments since it had happened someone had run into their house and brought out an old torn net curtain and laid it over Violet, covering her completely.

Dora saw the ghostly features of her little girl’s face through the two layers of net and the blood soaking into the slippery material. ‘What d’you go and cover her face for?’ she shouted.

She knelt down quickly and pulled back the soft curtain. Her face was expressionless as a stone as she saw the deep wound in Violet’s skull and the shards of bone sticking out at grotesque angles. She was dead. Clearly, from the second that the horse’s hoof had smashed into the right side of her head she had had no chance of being anything else.

The man with the cart was distraught. ‘I hadn’t a chance, Missis. She was just there, under the horse. I never even saw her till it were too late.’

Dora nodded at him numbly. She felt no anger towards him. At this moment she felt nothing. She had no idea why Violet had been there when she should have been in the yard. Gladys Pye appeared and led her home. Someone else carried the child’s body back to the house.

When Sid came home he stood looking down at her as she sat unmoving at the table. He put his face close up to hers, his breath stinking of beer.

‘Can’t even look out for your own kid now, can you?’

Three days later Rose was banging hard on the door of the vicarage.

When Catherine opened the door and saw the girl’s pinched face and the look of desperation in her eyes she immediately led her inside and sat down with her. Ronald arrived as well, back from conducting a baptism service.

‘It’s me mom,’ Rose said, starting to cry as the words came out of her mouth. All the anguish of the past days started to pour out of her. ‘Our Violet was killed by a horse on Wednesday.’

Catherine and Ronald looked at each other, appalled, but something stopped Catherine from following her instinct to put her arms round the girl. Rose was a warm person, but there was still a self-contained, dignified core to her that they’d seen in the small child they had carried in from the rain.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Ronald said. He knelt down beside her. Catherine watched, fascinated. For once she couldn’t think what to do and Ronald, gentle and sympathetic, knew instinctively.

‘But it’s my mom,’ Rose repeated. ‘She hasn’t said a word since Wednesday when it happened. She just sits there as if something’s gone – you know – in her head. My dad’s blamed her for Violet going. She ran out of the court when she wasn’t s’posed to, on some prank or other. Dad says her getting killed’s all Mom’s fault. But she won’t say nothing. She’ll hardly move or eat or anything.’

She cried harsh, frightened tears.

Ronald suddenly stood up as if something had been decided. ‘I’ll come down and see her,’ he said.

‘
You?
’ Rose and Catherine spoke exactly together.

‘Yes, I,’ he said and smiled wryly at their astonishment. ‘After all, I’m supposed to be a messenger of the Good News, remember. And I presume you came to us for some sort of help, Rose? Well, this is the best I can do.’

Rose, who was suddenly terrified that Sid might be in when they got home, had no idea how much inner turmoil the vicar was experiencing as once again they walked together along the road towards town and Catherine Street. Rose’s head reached above his elbow now, but she still had to make little skips to keep up with his long strides.

Ronald knew this was going to be a decisive morning in his life. He had realized gradually over the past years that he was in the wrong place. That his work in his present parish was not where his heart lay. He had encouraged Rose to tell him more and more about her life in the courtyards, of the conditions they lived in. Now he was going to visit the kind of place which drew him. Of course he could have chosen to walk round the Birch Street area at any time, but something had inhibited him. He would have been merely a voyeur. Now he had a real reason to go.

When George opened the door, Dora saw Rose standing outside with an enormous man, his dark clothes topped by a dog collar. She knew at once who he must be. At any other time she would have felt like giving Rose a good hiding for bringing him at all, let alone with no chance to get the place spick and span first. But at this moment she couldn’t have cared less.

Dora stood up silently. She looked more gaunt and pale than ever. Ronald saw just how small were the houses in which so many large families had to live, how mean and cramped.

‘Mom,’ Rose said. ‘This is the Reverend, Diana’s dad. I told him about our Violet and he wanted to come and see you himself.’

Dora looked at this stranger whose head nearly touched the ceiling, and uttered her first words for days. ‘You’d better make a cuppa tea, Rose,’ she said. ‘Kettle’s boiled.’ And then to Ronald: ‘Have a seat.’

Ronald sat down on a wooden chair at the table, carefully avoiding a blob of congealed porridge on the side of it. ‘I don’t want to intrude.’

He felt foolish as he spoke, knowing that apart from death itself and the Means Testers from the Parish he was the greatest intrusion they’d had for years. He could hear the baby crying upstairs.

Dora folded her arms across herself as if to hide her breasts. ‘Go and get him, Rose. I’ll have to feed the babby, if you’ll excuse me,’ she said to Ronald in a flat, lifeless voice.

Rose carried Harry down. He was a bonny four-month-old who looked as if he’d taken all the nourishment from his mother. He was beginning to look rather like Sam.

‘Now,’ Dora said decisively to Rose. ‘You can take this lot outside and leave us.’

She sat down with Harry on her lap, covering herself modestly with an old cardigan as she fed him. Rose, bemused, shoved Grace and George out of the door.

When the children had closed the door behind them Ronald said, ‘I’m so sorry to hear about little Violet, Mrs Lucas.’

The moment he spoke he saw her eyes fill with tears. ‘All I can think of is how all her life I’ve been that worried by everything I’ve hardly had a kind word to spare for her.’

She felt very shy, sitting feeding her child and blarting in front of this huge, educated stranger. But she could also feel an enormous sympathy emanating from Ronald Harper-Watt. And he had two things that she needed: distance from her own situation, so she could talk to him, and time. His job allowed him the opportunity to sit and listen.

‘You’re a good mother, Mrs Lucas,’ Ronald said gently. ‘You mustn’t think otherwise. Rose often talks about you – fondly.’ He’d noticed that more and more recently. ‘And it’s easy to tell you always do the best you can for your children. I know things haven’t been easy for you. I’m sure Violet knew you cared for her very much.’

Dora looked up at him, at his wide, handsome face, the brown hair swept back from his face and his kind, grey eyes. He was the first truly gentle man she could remember meeting.

She began to talk. She had sat in her house for three days feeling she was losing her mind. She had been afraid to speak for fear of what might come out – mad, raving gibberish so that she’d have to be locked away and never let out again.

For about twenty minutes Ronald didn’t speak at all. He sat listening attentively, watching Dora as she talked while the baby sucked and sucked at her breast.

She told him everything, from the early, happy days of her marriage to the present, how her once loving husband forced himself on her several times every month and she had almost no feeling left for him in her heart. She spared nothing, talking entirely out of her own need as if it was her last chance.

Finally she stopped and prepared more tea, laying Harry down on a chair. He had fallen asleep with a streak of milk still wet on one plump cheek.

‘So that’s my life, Mr Harper-Watt,’ Dora said, pouring more water into the pot. ‘Not much to show for it, is there? Sorry you had to listen to it all, but it’s been a relief to have a talk.’

‘No.’ Ronald sat forward to emphasize what he wanted to say. ‘You don’t realize. It’s been a privilege.’

She noticed suddenly that his large hands were trembling, and she felt disarmed by it.

‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘you’ve probably helped me more than I could ever help you. You see, I’ve been feeling very – out of place, shall we say? – in my work. I’m thinking of moving to work in a parish such as your own – like St Joseph’s.’

Dora stared at him. ‘You’re coming to St Joseph’s?’

‘Well, no. But I’d like a parish near the middle of the – a – city. In places which aren’t quite so . . .’ He was lost for tactful words.