Queen of the Mersey (50 page)

‘Your wife is unlikely to wake up during the night, Mr Oliver, not after all she’s been through. If she does, I promise I’ll give you a ring and you can come straight away.’

There was a beef casserole being kept warm in the oven when they got home. Daddy said it was courtesy of Freddy’s. ‘Queenie brought it earlier. She reckoned you’d be starving, and Gus is starving all the time.’

‘I’ll see to everything, Daddy.’ Hester gave her father a little push. Despite what had happened, she was quite hungry. ‘Sit down and I’ll make tea.’

‘But, darling, you must be exhausted after that long journey.’

‘I am, but not as exhausted as you. You’ll give me a hand, won’t you, Gus? Let’s eat off our knees in front of the fire. I shan’t bother setting the table.’

While they ate, she told them about Hollywood. There was a limit to what you could say in letters. She toned things down considerably. Under the circumstances, it didn’t seem right to describe the marvellous time she’d had.

The meal over, Gus went to bed and she was left alone with her father, who stared silently into the fire for a long time before he began to speak.

‘I think I should explain a bit about your mother, darling,’ he said, sighing wearily. ‘When she wakes up, she’s going to say things that you’ll find very strange.’

Hester frowned. ‘What sort of things, Daddy?’

‘That it’s her fault the baby died,’ he said dully. ‘That she murdered it. You see, at first, when she found out she was pregnant, she didn’t want the baby.

She was going to have an abortion.’

‘Mummy! An abortion! That’s not like her.’ She could hardly believe it.

‘She hasn’t exactly been herself in a long while.’ He went over to the sideboard. ‘I need a drink, something stronger than tea.’ He returned to the armchair with a bottle of whisky and a glass. ‘I know it doesn’t make sense, but that thing with Duncan affected her far more than it did you.’

‘But I never noticed!’

‘Probably because you were so upset yourself, that’s why. When you went away, she became much worse, almost impossible to live with.’

‘You should have told me,’ she cried. ‘I would have come home straight away.’

‘What would I have told you?’ he asked patiently. ‘That Mummy was in a stinking bad temper all the time? Would you have come home for that? It didn’t cross my mind there was a reason for it other than she’d taken on too much work at school. Perhaps that was the reason. I wouldn’t know. It’s only lately that I began to wonder if she should see a psychiatrist, but then I thought she’d be all right when the baby was born.’

‘Why did she want an abortion in the first place?’

‘She didn’t want her teaching career disrupted. I insisted it was murder, but now I wish I’d just left her to it. Anything would have been better than the way things did turn out.’

‘It is murder, Daddy. I’m all in favour of abortion, but no one can deny it’s murder.’

‘You’re in favour!’ He looked surprised. ‘Strange, I never dreamt you’d think like that. I clearly don’t know you very well, do I?’ He smiled ironically.

‘Would you have been in favour of your mother aborting your sister? She had to have a name, by the way, for the burial. Mummy wasn’t in a fit position to pick one, so I chose Christine. I didn’t want to use the name of anyone I knew, and can’t remember ever having met a Christine in my life.’

‘I knew some girls in Hollywood who’d had abortions. They didn’t want a child disrupting their careers, either. I thought that very hard, but who am I to approve or disapprove? It was their bodies, their careers, nothing to do with me or anyone else.’

‘Was Mummy being hard?’

‘Of course she was, but please don’t let’s get into an argument, Daddy,’ she pleaded. ‘I’ll tell you this much, when Mary became pregnant, I desperately wanted her to get rid of the baby. I had to stop myself from going to Glover Street and insisting that she did. If she’d agreed, I’d’ve been willing to forgive Duncan and take him back. I thought it more selfish of Mary to have the baby, than make love with my fiancé in the first place. Just think of all the misery that would have saved! Mary, Duncan, me, Vera, and now you say Mummy – we all would have been so much happier.’

Daddy smiled drily. ‘Possibly, darling, except I’m not sure if Mary and Duncan would agree with that, not now. I understand Flora is a beautiful baby, absolutely delightful. And would you sooner have not gone to Hollywood?’

‘What you don’t know, you don’t miss, Vera always says that. There’s just one last thing, Daddy. What made Mummy change her mind and go ahead with the baby?’

‘I’m not sure, Hester.’ She thought he looked rather evasive. ‘I’m just not sure.’

Chapter 17

After Hester had spent a week in Liverpool, she realised there was no chance of going back to Hollywood when she’d planned. Mummy had been discharged from hospital forty-eight hours after the baby’s birth. The doctor said that, physically, she was quite fit, but it would do her mental state no good at all to remain in a place where other women’s babies could be seen and heard.

‘Perhaps a good rest in familiar surroundings will do the trick.’

The familiar surroundings didn’t help a bit. Her mother was nothing like her old self. Daddy did his utmost to persuade Hester to return. ‘I’ll hire a day nurse,’ he argued. ‘I can take over when I come home from work. Gus will help.’

But Hester had no intention of allowing her brother’s young life to be taken up helping to care for an invalid, at least not while she was around. Even less did she want a strange woman looking after her mother.

‘I’m staying,’ she told her father flatly. ‘You can argue until the cows come home, but you’d be wasting your time. I’ll go back, don’t worry, once Mummy’s better.’ She wrote and asked Steven if he would cancel her room at the Wellington and put her possessions in store. ‘I don’t know when I’ll be able to get away from here, but I will one day, I promise. And please tell Elfreda she’d better get someone else.’

Steven wrote back to say her things were now in the wardrobe in his room.

You had a pathetically small amount. I’ll take them with me when I move into my new apartment, which means you’ll have to live with me when you come back!

You’ll love the new place, Hes. It overlooks the Hollywood hills. I thought it about time I moved out of that crap hotel and found a place more fitting for a guy who’ll be making his fourth movie in the New Year (with an even bigger part this time).

He finished by saying he’d told Elfreda and she sent her love, which Hester didn’t believe for a minute.

But as the weeks turned into months and her mother showed no sign of getting better, Hester was forced to face the likelihood of it being a long, long time before she could get away.

According to the family doctor, Laura was suffering from something called Post-Natal Depression, which could have happened even if the baby hadn’t been stillborn. ‘Hopefully, she’ll snap out of it soon. Until she does, I’d advise she went into a nursing home where she can be looked after properly.’

‘I’m already looking after her properly,’ Hester had snapped. ‘She’ll go into a home over my dead body.’

Roddy demanded a second opinion. The new doctor considered that the patient had been suffering from depression for a long while and the stillborn child was merely the catalyst that had tipped her over the edge. He also suggested a nursing home.

Roddy had no intention of letting his wife go into a home, but again suggested they engage a nurse so Hester could go away.

‘No,’ Hester said stubbornly. ‘I’d never enjoy myself in Hollywood, not in a million years. I’d be thinking about Mummy all the time. I’d sooner stay here with you and Gus.’

She felt guilty for not noticing her mother hadn’t been well before she went away, for seeing nothing odd about the fact that most of the letters she received were written by her father and her mother’s had been very short and didn’t say much at all. She felt guilty for not coming home when things had got really bad, even though she hadn’t known. Roddy felt guilty and blamed himself for everything. Gus thought he should have been kinder and less impatient. ‘I stayed out as much as I could. I thought she was just being bad-tempered.’ Even Queenie wanted to kick herself for not being more understanding when Laura had told her she was pregnant. ‘I was terribly short with her. It was the mention of abortion that did it.’ Vera hadn’t noticed anything other than her friend seemed a bit out of sorts, but felt guilty for not wondering why.

Everyone was looking at things with hindsight. If only we’d known this. If only we’d done that.

There were days when Laura seemed quite normal. ‘Shall I make us something to eat?’ she would ask, but when Hester went into the kitchen, she would find her mother in floods of tears, having forgotten all about food. ‘I killed my baby,’

she would sob. ‘I wished it dead.’ This was usually a signal for her to go into a sort of trance, hearing nothing, saying nothing, just staring into space for hours on end.

Other days, she refused to get out of bed. ‘I feel so tired, sweetheart,’ she would whimper and sleep for hours, often waking with a raging headache, sitting up in bed, rocking back and forth, holding her head because the pain was unbearable. Some nights she hardly slept, tossing and turning, keeping the whole house awake with her groans.

She seemed to have forgotten she’d been a teacher. When her friends from school came, she would stare at them in utter incomprehension. ‘I don’t like to be rude, but who are you?’ Hester was glad when the friends stopped coming.

Once, she went looking for her mother in the bathroom where she seemed to have been an awfully long time, and found her with a razor blade pressed against her wrist. ‘Stop!’ she screamed, and cut her own hand badly when she wrested the razor out of her hand.

‘What was I doing, sweetheart?’ Mummy asked mildly.

‘Don’t you know? Can’t you remember?’

‘Didn’t I just have a bath?’

‘Yes, but … oh, it doesn’t matter.’ She put all the razor blades on top of the wardrobe and remembered the same thing had been done when Gus was little, though it hadn’t been to prevent him from killing himself.

Her father was horrified when she told him. ‘Christ Almighty.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘She’ll have to be watched every damn minute.’

‘This won’t do,’ Queenie said sternly when Hester had been back from America for six months. ‘You’ve got to get out more. When was the last time you went out at night or shopping in town on your own?’

‘Last week,’ Hester replied. ‘I went to the pictures with Gus, but I don’t like leaving Daddy to cope on his own.’

‘You cope on your own all week, and it won’t do, Hester, love. Oh, I know how badly you want to look after Laura, but it’s not right. In another few days, you’ll be twenty-two. Will you still be doing the same thing when you’re twenty-three? Or thirty-three, come to that?’

‘I don’t know,’ Hester said miserably, thinking about the lovely time she’d had on her twenty-first.

‘Why don’t you get a part-time job?’

‘I couldn’t possibly! Who’d look after Mummy?’

‘I know someone who would, someone you can rely on. And there’s a part-time vacancy in Freddy’s; two until half-five on the toy counter. It would suit you perfectly, get you out of the house so you can talk to people other than Laura and yourself.’

‘Did you just make that job up?’

‘Of course not,’ Queenie said indignantly, though Hester suspected that she had.

‘Who’s the someone I can trust?’

‘My mother.’

Theo had said, so many times, so reproachfully, ‘I can’t understand you, darling. I can’t understand how anyone could not care about their mother. She’s your only blood relative. She came to you when she was on her uppers because you were the only person she had in the world.’

Queenie had given up pointing out her mother hadn’t bothered to contact her when she wasn’t on her uppers. Theo thought loyalty to a parent should rise above such trifling matters as the parent beating you black and blue when you were a child and throwing you downstairs.

So, with great reluctance, she’d gone to see her mother, whose welcome had been so effusive, so obsequious, that Queenie had felt hugely embarrassed.

‘I knew you’d come one day,’ Agnes had said breathlessly. ‘Thank you, luv, for everything; the flat, the clothes, the allowance. I never dreamt I’d end up in such a grand place.’

It seemed mean to say that her daughter hadn’t paid for any of these things.

‘That’s all right,’ Queenie muttered.

Her mother went on to say how much she was enjoying herself, playing cards on Monday afternoons with a woman upstairs and her friends, learning to play Bridge, regularly attending the Methodist church around the corner. She had also joined the Townswomen’s Guild.

She was a fine-looking woman, Queenie had to give her that, what with the new hairstyle, the subdued makeup, the clothes, even the elegant apartment, which she kept spick and span, all had contributed to turning her into a vastly different woman from the one who’d arrived at Freddy’s a few short months ago.

‘The church is having a coffee morning a week on Saturday, luv. Perhaps you’d like to come?’ she said eagerly.

‘I work all day Saturdays.’ She wouldn’t have gone had Saturday been completely free.

‘Oh, well, luv, never mind. Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Please.’ It would help pass the time.

‘Let us know beforehand when you come again, I’ll get in some nice cakes,’ Agnes said when she returned with a nicely set tray of tea things.

‘I will,’ Queenie said through gritted teeth.

The tray was put on the coffee table, Agnes leaned over, picked up the teapot, put it back, then collapsed on to the settee in a flurry of wild tears. ‘Oh, luv,’ she sobbed. ‘Oh, Queenie. I’m dead sorry. I was an awful mam, dead cruel.

You’ve no idea how bad I feel when I think back and remember all the horrible things I did. I don’t know what got into me, I really don’t. I must have been dead unhappy or something.’

‘Well, you made me feel dead unhappy,’ Queenie said coldly. If she’d been embarrassed before, she felt even more so now. She reached gingerly for her mother’s arm and patted it. ‘Don’t cry,’ she said stiffly.