Orphan of Angel Street (19 page)

‘Dry as a dusty attic. Well, see ’ow yer like this then!’

He pushed his face into the most private parts of her, so that all she could feel was the hard grip of his hands on her thighs, his tongue licking, intruding, and the painful rasp of his stubbly chin.

‘Oh God,’ she whimpered. ‘No – stop. Please. I beg you, not this . . .’ The most degrading, disgusting . . . She felt sick with revulsion at him, at those unseen, awful parts of her body . . . She wanted to lose consciousness rather than feel any more of this gross nuzzling. She put her hands tight over her face, forced her mind right down into the blackness inside herself.

‘That’s better – I like a nice wet cunt . . .’

He was hugely aroused now, and she knew her own powerlessness was as much a stimulant to him as the feel of her body.

‘Now then, my wench.’ He pushed up hard inside her, his face, wet with her juices forced against her own cheeks, his thick-lipped mouth on hers making her sick to her stomach.

‘Go on,’ he pumped urgently. ‘Cry out – you’ve got to cry out . . .’

Grace squeezed out a few distressed, catlike sounds and he climaxed, arms tensed straight, face puce, the veins on his neck sticking out.

Minutes later he was asleep, prone on his belly, breathing heavily.

Grace crept from the bed and poured water from the pitcher on the washstand into the deep, rose-ringed bowl. She washed all that she could of him away from her sore body, still sick with revulsion. She who had, all those years ago, committed this act of union with a man in such rapture! So long ago, the feelings buried by all that had happened since, that it seemed a life belonging to someone else.

She stood looking at Neville before blowing out the lamp.

Die, she prayed. Die an honourable death in France. The stain be on my soul, but God in heaven, please grant it that he die.

Death was to visit Angel Street, one death among so many in 1917, yet one which was as tragic and untimely as any of them.

Early one April morning, returning from the privy down the yard, Mercy heard a woman’s high, grief-stricken wail, a shrill keening that no walls would contain.

She hesitated for a moment, unsure where it was coming from, the sound causing the hair to stand up on her neck and her heart to beat like a hammer. Mrs Ripley was also out there, staring down towards the entry, face as hard as a flat-iron.

‘My God!’ Mercy cried aloud. ‘That’s Elsie!’

She tore down to number one and as she did so their door opened and Bummy Pepper tore out pulling on his jacket as he ran heavily, lurchingly down the entry.

She heard Elsie’s cries coming from upstairs and stepped inside, relieved to see Rosalie looking the picture of health. Jack was with her.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Our Cathleen—’ Jack could barely get the words out. ‘Summat’s ’appened to ’er.’

‘Where’s your dad . . .?’

‘Gone for Dr Manley.’

It had gone quiet upstairs. ‘Should I go up?’ Mercy asked, full of dread.

‘I think yer should,’ Rosalie was trembling. ‘None of us knows what to do – she’s up the top.’

Mercy climbed the narrow stairs which, unlike theirs at number two, had a thin runner of carpet up the middle of them. The second flight was bare and Mercy felt as if her boots were making the most deafening sound.

‘Doctor?’ Elsie sprang out of the attic room looking like a madwoman. Her red hair was a wild mass round her head and her eyes were stretched wide and full of terror. ‘Oh, it’s you. Oh my God,’ she moaned. ‘I thought you was Dr Manley.’

‘What’s happened? I hope you don’t mind me coming up, only . . .’

Elsie grabbed Mercy’s hand and pulled her into the room.

‘Look – look at ’er! My girl – what the ’ell’s ’appened to ’er?’

She broke down again and began sobbing helplessly. ‘I don’t know what to do for ’er. I just don’t know how to help ’er!’

Mercy’s legs turned weak and shaky at the sight of Cathleen. A seeping patch of red half covered her pillow and a very straight line of blood led from her mouth down the side of her chin. Her face was sickly yellow against her red hair, lips a strange blue. Her eyes were closed and she seemed lifeless, lying there on her side, except for an occasional shallow, rasping breath.

‘I can’t rouse ’er!’ Elsie cried, going to the bed again. She picked up her daughter’s limp hand. ‘Cathleen, Cathleen, chicken, say summat to me! Open your eyes and look at me – it’s your mom. Just show me you can hear me for God’s sake!’

Cathleen’s head gave the faintest movement.

‘There – did you see that?’ Elsie shook her suddenly, taking her by the shoulders, the girl’s head lolling back, and there came a sudden, horrifying gush of blood from Cathleen’s mouth. Mercy saw it spurt up in a thick, scarlet jet. Cathleen’s back arched and her eyes snapped wildly open for a second as the blood poured out over her chin, spreading darkly across the bed. Elsie screamed in horror, recoiling from her, and Cathleen fell back like a rag doll and lay quite still. Elsie’s screams went on and on.

Mercy felt the blood drain from her own face. Blackness come down on her like a shutter. When she came groggily round from her faint she was propped against the wall, head pushed between her knees and Elsie was beside Cathleen sobbing and shouting, imploring her to speak.

By the time Bummy arrived back with Dr Manley, Cathleen was dead.

‘I told ’er. I kept telling ’er to get a job somewhere else.’

The doctor told him over and over that there was nothing to suggest Cathleen’s munitions work had anything to do with her death, but Bummy needed to blame something and it was all he could think of.

‘I’ve seen ’em,’ he said, distraught, to anyone who’d listen. ‘Them young girls all fainting and sick outside them shell factories. It killed ’er, that did. It did for our girl.’

The doctor said Cathleen had died of a brain haemorrhage, a ruptured artery in her head. But when he talked to Elsie during the numb days after Cathleen’s death he said, ‘You know, Mrs Pepper, I’ve known Cathleen since she was a young child, and I’ve often suspected that she wasn’t long for this world. That bluish complexion, the lack of strength . . . The child was almost certainly born with a defective heart. If it hadn’t been for this, that would most likely have killed her sooner or later.’

‘All this time and we never knew.’ Elsie was inconsolable. ‘Why didn’t ’e tell us?’

‘’E said ’e couldn’t’ve done nothing except for upset and worry us,’ Bummy said, fighting the tears which kept welling up in his eyes. His face was shrunken, the life knocked out of it. After a silence he said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t bloody know, that I don’t.’

‘At least we’ve got ’er to bury,’ Elsie said. ‘Not like Frank. Oh Alf, what’s ’appening to our family? We’ve always looked after our kids, tried to bring ’em up right. Now everything’s falling apart. And Tom and Johnny going over there . . .’ Sobbing, she said, ‘I’d cry out before God if I thought there was one, but now I’m not so sure there is.’

September 1917

They marched into Ypres at evening, along the road from Poperinge, walking in a silence broken only by the clump of boots on the cobbled streets and the thud of guns. It was already almost dark as they crossed the Ypres–Yser Canal, and the silky blue of the sky was lit up ahead by the German counter-attack, shells exploding, flashes of light which quickly evaporated, leaving it seeming a shade darker than before.

Tom marched, half hypnotized by the rhythmic sound of feet around him and heady from drinking rum in the
estaminet
in Poperinge. Johnny was ahead of him along the line, and with them somewhere, two other Midlanders, Billy Cammett from Kidderminster and Fred Donaldson from Erdington. The four of them had been transferred to this company together and were now surrounded by taciturn, undramatic Suffolk men, some of whom had heard the boom of the guns from Flanders across their farmland even before they’d left home. Most were young like himself, no more than lads. In this war you could be a veteran at twenty-one.

The air was rank with smoke and cordite. It was dry tonight. Earlier a hazy sun had shone over the flat Belgian fields as they waited behind the lines, rehearsing campaign strategies, outlining objectives again and again for this push on Zonnebeke, one of the hurdles standing in the way of Passchendaele Ridge. They had eaten well – for here at least – concoctions fashioned from army biscuits, bully beef rissoles, Trench pudding with jam. Johnny had boxed that afternoon against a beefy-faced farm lad from Saxmundham.

And they wrote letters. Tom sent a postcard to his mom and dad. He sat for a long time trying to write to Mercy. Mercy, his girl, his love. He strained to see her face before him, this girl from another existence. He found he had no words. Since August, words to describe anything, to connect in any true way with the life at home, had deserted him. His first experience at the Front, his soldiering baptism, was the Passchendaele salient and even those present were hard pushed to take in the extremity of its horrors. The letter was tucked, barely begun, into the pocket of his tunic, pressed tight to his heart. He kept Mercy’s image as a light, a flower in no man’s land, a shred of purity to keep him a man.

Tom had known very early on that he was not made for the army: all the noisy camaraderie into which Johnny fitted as if he had been born to the life. Johnny, quickly christened ‘Ginger’ by the Suffolks, relished the ribbing, the half-friendly brawls, the boxing, drinking, everyone in together.

Almost from the moment he began training Tom had loathed all of it, ashamed though he was to admit it. This was what it was to be a man: soldiering. It had been exciting to get out of Birmingham: Sutton Park, France, Belgium. But he was homesick. Missed his mom and his sisters, even dopey old Cathleen. And with an ache of longing and desire made strong by all the talk of sexual exploits by the other lads, he missed Mercy. He dreamed of her constantly, her face, hair, her bare skin . . . This, all this war was a waste of time for no other reason than it took him away from her.

Tom played football while they were on rest, did his best to join in, but mostly he sat, quiet, on his own. Johnny picked up French or Belgian girls with casual ease, all attracted by his strong muscular frame, his lively cheek, his generosity and jokes. This evening a round-faced blonde had sat on Johnny’s lap in the estaminet screaming with laughter, pressing kisses on his cheeks although they shared barely a word of spoken language in common. Tom knew perfectly well that Johnny’s relations with women had progressed a hell of a lot further than his ever had.

‘You want to get yerself a bird – get cheered up!’ Johnny told him. He even thought of it, looked around, sized up a few. But they weren’t Mercy.

And tonight, while he put on a show of smiling, cracking jokes as Billy Cammett’s chubby face with a little brown moustache grinned back at him, and the little leather-cheeked man played his squeezebox, he had not been able to forget for a single moment what they were being primed for, the place of abomination to which they were being sent back.

‘I’ll ’ave to go out,’ he’d said two or three times as his guts writhed.

‘What’s up, back door trots again?’ Billy guffawed, slapping his leg as Tom nodded grimly, hurrying to the back of the steamy cafe´, face twisted with urgency.

Walking now, he felt weak and nauseous. They’d passed the jagged silhouette of Ypres’s ruined Cloth Hall at the centre of this broken, ghostly town and were heading out on the Menin Road. The stench of the salient was already overpowering: of death, of putrefaction, of gas-infused yellow mud. To step into this bulge of land, the foremost tongue of Allied territory held on the Flanders Front, was to walk into hell. It was a place of constant unease and fear.

Since the end of July the fighting had zigzagged back and forth across the ten-mile-stretch of land between Ypres and the ruined village on Passchendaele Ridge. The Allies had speedily taken the first five miles, but had not reckoned on the sophisticated strength of German fortifications further back: iron-reinforced pillboxes defended by hidden gun emplacements. The Allies pushed forwards: were forced back again and again.

It had begun to rain. Then to turn into the wettest August in living memory. This plain of reclaimed Flanders land already existed in a delicate balance, drained by ditches and channels. Bombardment by shells, the constant criss-crossing by carts and horses, gun carriers, thousands of men, and weeks of incessant rain had turned it into a churned-up quagmire, some parts possessing a terrible, active suction which could pull a man down in minutes.

Tom had spent two weeks at the Front, rain falling into his face as he arrived, while he slept on duckboards with the water rising over them, as they fought, moving through knee-deep mud with shells, bullets and water raining down on them. They were never dry. Always rain, rain and stinking mud so that even the rats looked bloated like sponges.

Yet he and Johnny had survived to live with sights that gave Tom no peace in his dreams. And they were going back. He sensed in his guts that he would not come through again. Even now he felt weak and defeated.

He remembered the faces of men he’d seen in the days before marching back from the Front. They had not spoken. Exhaustion weighted their limbs even more heavily than the mud drying heavy and cracked on their uniforms, faces, hands. But it was the eyes. A few, very few, appeared defiantly, almost feverishly cheerful. The rest were vacant, somehow absent in their own bodies as if their spirits had fled in the face of all that had been set before them, the effect of it all the more terrible for being unspoken.

By the time they reached the reserve trenches they were already exhausted. They relieved another company. Tom wasn’t sure which, didn’t care, but he heard their northern accents, guessed they were Manchesters.

‘Good luck, pal,’ one said to him. ‘You’ll bloody need it.’ They were desperate to get away to safety, food, to get deloused, to sleep.

There was little in the way of sleep to be had here that night. About a hundred yards behind, the advanced batteries were thundering deafeningly, well before dawn, and the answering bombardment of sound was kept up from behind the ridge. Tom fell in and out of an uneasy sleep, sitting against the side of the trench, head lolling first one side, then the other. He vomited a number of times, too weak and tired even to move, and sat in the smell of it. I ought to report sick, he thought. But even the effort required to do that was beyond him.