Orphan of Angel Street (12 page)

There was still a smile in her eyes as she came in and closed the door.

As soon as they were alone Dorothy began to sob, the pent-up emotions of relief, guilt and sorrow pouring out.

‘Whatever’s happened?’ Grace moved to her straight away, putting her arms round her, her fair head close to Dorothy’s dark one. For these women were much more than employer and servant. They had been a close support and bearer of each other’s confidences for some years.

Dorothy turned her head at last and looked fearfully into Grace’s pale eyes. She saw anguish seize her mistress’s face as she said, ‘I saw her – today, when I was in town. I’ve found her. I’ve found Mercy.’

Not many afternoons later, Dorothy arrived in Angel Street bringing with her two dresses, one in yellow lawn, the other in soft blue wool, and a pair of boots that she hoped would fit Mercy.

Seeing both her and her gifts, Mercy blushed with pleasure and danced overjoyed round the room with the yellow dress held against her. ‘Oh Dorothy, I’ve never seen anything so pretty before!’

‘And this one will be lovely for Susan – look.’ She laid the blue frock against Susan, and Dorothy saw the child beam with delight. She’d been about to protest that both dresses were for Mercy, but she kept quiet. Let the other poor kid have one. The dress she had on now was a terrible grey bag of a thing.

‘You didn’t buy these did you?’ Mercy asked anxiously.

‘No – the mistress, my employer – she’s got older daughters with lots of lovely clothes . . .’ She and Grace had worked on this harmless lie together. They were in fact hand-me-downs from the daughters of friends. ‘She said I could hand them on to someone who needed them.’

‘She’s very kind,’ Mercy said, trying to imagine such wealth and benevolence.

‘You going to make ’er some tea?’ Susan asked timidly. She was rather in awe of Dorothy who, although only a servant, seemed to have appeared from a completely different existence where people still had dresses that looked new when they’d finished with them.

Mercy ran out to the tap to fill the kettle. They talked all afternoon. Mercy could barely keep still in her excitement at having Dorothy there. She told her cautiously about her life in Angel Street, playing on the positive side for Susan’s sake. She talked about school, the Peppers, Elsie’s kindness.

‘Johnny and Tom, the twins, they’re my best pals – well, after Susan! And there’s little Rosalie, she’s nearly five now . . .’

Dorothy listened, trying to keep all her attention on Mercy’s face, but she couldn’t help her gaze wandering, taking in the rotten state of the place: furniture supplemented with orange crates, the broken floor, and the mean, loathsome smells of damp and mould which she found unspeakably depressing. The more so because it brought back memories of her own childhood. Going into service at fourteen had been her salvation and she was grateful for it daily.

Preparing to leave after their chat she said, ‘Let me know if there’s anything you need, Mercy. And you, Susan,’ she added kindly.

She was moving to embrace Mercy when Mabel came barging in from work.

‘I see no one’s bothered scrubbing the step.’ She was carrying on before she’d even got in. ‘Oi – what’s going on?’ Mercy heard panic in her voice. ‘Who’re you?’

Mercy stepped forward and said proudly, ‘This is Dorothy.’

‘Oh yes – Dorothy who?’ Mabel’s tone was brazen but wary, her arms crossed defensively. She and Dorothy were eyeing each other up with instant mutual distrust.

‘She looked after me in the home.’

‘What’s that rubbish you’re talking?’ Mabel blustered. What with the NSPCC turning up on her doorstep and now this, Mabel was beginning to feel quite persecuted.

‘You’re a born liar, aren’t you?’ Dorothy said, disgusted. ‘It were only two years ago, not a lifetime. D’you think I wouldn’t be able to remember what someone looks like? Lucky for you she wants to stay here at the moment or I could make trouble for you. But I’ll be keeping an eye on Mercy from now on, and don’t you forget it.’

February 1914

‘I’ve got it – ’e give me the job!’

Mercy tore into Elsie’s house to tell Susan. Thanks to Johnny Pepper she had her first job at the bakery in Digbeth where he was employed as a delivery boy.

‘Well there you are,’ Elsie smiled. She was fixing up her escaping coils of rusty hair. ‘You’re a worker. You’ll get on, you will.’

‘’Course you got it,’ Susan beamed. ‘I said you would, didn’ I?’

‘I might be in with a chance of the odd loaf or bag of stale cakes, you never know!’ Mercy was laughing partly with relief as she went to stand behind Susan. It had been her first shot at getting a job and she’d been nervous. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘That’s beautiful, that is!’

Over Susan’s shoulder she could see the neat job she was doing mending the astrakhan collar on an overcoat. She was good at it – and not just hand sewing either. Just after Christmas which had been drab and bleak, a miracle had happened.

Mrs White, the miserable, reclusive woman in the cottage across the yard, had dropped dead, aged fifty-seven. Mr White put it all down to nerves. Shortly after, looking a good deal more cheerful than, as Elsie put it, ‘’e ’ad a right to,’ he started carrying a whole load of stuff out into the yard.

‘I could cart it off and flog it,’ he said, unshaven but chirpy. ‘But I thought if any of yer’d give us a bob for anything . . .’

With an absolute lack of sentiment he laid out Mrs White’s small selection of clothes over a couple of battered chairs.

‘Oh my word,’ Mary Jones exclaimed to Elsie. ‘’E’s even brought ’er drawers out. Well I wouldn’t be . . .’ She trailed off.

‘What? Seen dead in ’em? Don’t suppose she ’ad that in mind either. Depends ’ow fussy you can afford to be, don’t it?’ Elsie looked thoughtful. ‘Be different if she’d been the least bit pleasant some’ow, wouldn’t it?’

There was a small, oblong mirror, a threadbare old coat and Mrs White’s few personal bits and bobs: hairpins, a brush, corset, a doll with a chipped porcelain face, old shoes with bunion-shaped hills in them, spectacles. And – Mercy caught her breath – almost seeming to glow in the knife-edged cold as it sat on its wrought iron base across the yard: an old Singer sewing machine. She galloped across.

‘’Ow much d’you want for that?’ Never mind whether it worked. They’d make it work.

‘Well ’ow much can yer give me?’ Mr White seemed in a celebratory mood.

‘’E must be as short as anything – no wage or nothing coming in,’ Mercy said to Susan after. ‘’E just didn’t seem to care.’

Susan shrugged. ‘Looks as if the only thing ’e really wanted shot of’s already gone.’

They gave him five shillings for the machine. Mabel stared at it as if it were about to lay a golden egg. Bummy Pepper gave it a clean up and oiled it, humming to himself. They bought a new needle and spools and Susan was in business. Well almost.

Gradually, by word of mouth, she was getting odd bits of work. When Dorothy came round Mercy showed her Susan’s neat skills.

‘I’m sure Mrs Weston – my mistress – will know people who need a seamstress,’ Dorothy said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

The jobs had already begun to trickle in. Susan was happier than Mercy had ever seen her. Her usually tiny appetite had picked up, she had a pink tinge in her cheeks and an air of purpose.

‘I’m so lucky, aren’t I, Mrs Pepper?’ she said to Elsie one day. And Elsie’s tired face lifted into a smile. If someone in Susan’s state felt lucky, she was a lesson to all of them.

‘Now you’ve got two earners in your ’ouse,’ she said to Mercy. ‘Mabel’ll be stopping to put ’er feet up.’

When Mercy had been at work for a few weeks she came home carrying a cage in which there was a grey parrot with lead-shot eyes.

‘’Ere you are, as promised.’ She put the cage on the table. ‘It was a lark bringing this ’ome on the bus, I can tell yer!’

Mabel would be outraged with her for squandering money in this way but Mercy didn’t care.

Susan gasped at the sight of it.

‘He’s lovely! Is it a boy one?’

‘The bloke said so. What’re you going to call ’im?’ Susan put her head on one side. The parrot did the same and Susan, Mercy and Elsie roared with laughter.

‘George,’ Susan said, wiping her eyes. ‘’E looks like a George to me.’

One Saturday evening soon after, Mabel was waiting for Stan again. This time she wasn’t in bed but sitting downstairs at the stained table sipping strong tea with plenty of sugar and cursing George who was scratching round the bottom of the cage screeching to himself.

‘I’d find a recipe for parrot pie if I ’ad my way,’ she growled at him. ‘Noisy, stinking thing.’

She soon heard the latch go and there was Stan, dressed only in a singlet and braces with his trousers although it was so cold you could see your breath even in the house.

‘What’s all this?’ All these months she’d been upstairs waiting for him, and here she was fully dressed without even a promising bit of breast showing.

‘Shut the door, Stan, I’ve summat to talk to yer about.’

He kicked the door shut and went to stand by the range, slicking his hair back. Not being very observant, he didn’t notice Mabel’s excited expression.

‘What’s up – eh? We gunna go and get on with it in a tick?’ He jerked his head meaningfully towards the stairs.

Mabel started to smile, showing her big, gappy teeth. ‘It’s happened, Stan. It had to in the end, didn’t it? I’m carrying your babby.’

Stan’s face fell into a study of shock.

‘But, Mabel, I thought – I mean we’ve been at it a long time now. I thought you couldn’t no longer – not like Mary . . .’

Mabel had in a roundabout way led Stan to believe she couldn’t conceive again, and as the months passed she’d come close to convincing herself as well. All this time and nothing. But now . . . Now she had a chance of hooking herself a breadwinner at last and another babby into the bargain! This time she’d have a proper child. Someone to love her. She’d prove she could be a mother like anyone else. She stood up and went to nuzzle her face against Stan’s chest, slipping one arm round him, she unfastened her blouse with the other to show her generous cleavage.

‘Say you’re pleased, Stan?’ she wheedled. ‘Your babby. You and me. We can ’ave a fresh start now – get away from all our worries. You can get away from her.’

‘Are you mad, woman?’ Stan pushed her away, agitatedly pulled his fags out. He lit one and stood puffing away, tapping his thigh with his other hand with quick, taut movements.

‘I’ve already got four kids. You told me, Mabel—’ He pointed the cigarette like a gun in her crumpling face. ‘You lied to me, you did . . .’

Stan’s brain never worked quickly at the best of times and it was on overtime shift now. He’d never questioned Mabel’s version of her infertility since his only interest was in getting his leg over. Now she was really putting the wind up him and he couldn’t think fast enough what to do.

‘I don’t know why you’re laying the blame on me any’ow, you’re that easy. ’Ow do I know who else you’ve been with?’

He used his indignation to propel himself out of the house. Then he stuck his head back through the door.

‘And don’t you come laying the blame on me and upsetting my missis. She’s got enough on ’er plate as it is!’

When Mercy and Susan got home that evening, depositing bags of scrag-end, potatoes and greens on the table with a pound of sausage, bags of broken biscuits and bruised apples, Mabel was upstairs in her room. Good, Mercy thought, that’s her out of the way.

‘Mom?’ Susan called up to her.

No reply. The two of them listened.

‘She’s blarting,’ Susan said, amazed.

‘What on earth can’ve happened?’ Mercy was frowning.

Mabel wasn’t a weeper, normally speaking, but today she wasn’t taking any trouble to hide her sniffles and mewling noises. She’d really and truly believed Stan would drop everything for her. After all, he did nothing but complain about Mary. But now it was she, Mabel, who was being thrown aside like an old piece of scrap. Just when she thought it might be her turn for some luck for once in life! She was carrying another babby with no husband, precious little money and only that little cow Mercy to help her. Let alone what she’d get in the way of clever comments from smug-faced Elsie Pepper. No – she got up hurriedly off the sordid bed. She wasn’t having that. There was only one thing for it.

A few moments later she came heavily downstairs, blowsy and dishevelled-looking. The two girls turned wide eyes on her, the blotchy cheeks and swollen eyes obvious even in the gaslight.

‘Mom.’ Susan looked away, her cheeks turning pink. ‘Your blouse . . .’

‘Oh, ah—’ Mabel fumblingly buttoned herself back into it. ‘I’ve come to a decision. We’ve got to move.’

‘Move?’ Susan said, bewildered. Mercy listened in disbelief.

‘Yes, move,’ Mabel snapped. ‘To another ’ouse. Another part of town, away from ’ere. If yer must know, I’m expecting Stan Jones’s babby and I don’t want to bring it into the world around the likes of this lot.’

After a couple of days in which Mabel’s house was full of nothing but rows on this subject, Stan’s brain caught up with his body and he did some (for him) quick thinking. Here he was, still a young man, struggling, with no real skills to get a decent job, a frail and prematurely aged wife and four brats all trapped together in a rotting house. He was drowning in the difficulties of it, could feel his youth and strength being sucked from him. Didn’t he deserve another chance?

And Mabel was offering it – a strong woman, older than him, capable of working. One kid – she wasn’t bringing that cripple with her, oh no. They could avoid having any more. And she was a bit of all right in bed, Mabel was – that was the main thing about her.

On the third morning, after retching over the scullery sink, Mabel left for work with a bag and never came home in the evening. Susan was worried to death until they discovered that Stan had disappeared too and suddenly it was clear as anything what had happened.

‘I knew she was a scheming, worthless liar,’ Elsie raged to Bummy that night. ‘But I never thought she’d go and desert that kid of ’ers. And as for poor Mary . . .’