September Starlings (33 page)

Uncle Freddie cleared his throat. ‘The nuns will take you back, Laura. I had a word with Sister Maria Goretti, and she knows that you would pass the entrance examination. So if John and Liza can pay the fees, then everything will be fine.’

They’d all been talking behind my back, they’d been arranging my life, deciding what I would be, where I should go, how long I’d stay wherever they chose to put me. That temper of mine simmered, bubbled and popped open. ‘I’m not going.’

‘You see?’ screamed Mother, all attempts at ladyhood finally abandoned. ‘She won’t listen. She writes every week to that nun, tells her all the secrets, never talks to me. I have done my best, but this wilful child is determined to ruin her own life. That terrible boy is at the back of this. Until he started coming regularly, Laura worked hard at school.’

Miss Armitage sighed. ‘Laura has never worked hard. She has relied solely on her wits. If she had tried her very best, she would have left the rest of the scholarship year standing. But she never tried. Isn’t that right, Laura?’

Tommo had told me never to listen. They would run my existence for me, he always said. He had very special eyes, the sort of eyes that say things. He loved me. After a few
years, once we became grown-ups, Tommo would tell me in words about his love, then he would take me away to a magic place and we would have children and cats and a dog and—

‘Laura!’ My father did not often raise his voice. ‘Look at me. The nuns at St Mary’s have taken a house on Chorley New Road. It is for girls who live out of town, girls whose parents work away or abroad. You will live in that house as a weekly boarder. I shall drive you to school each Monday morning, then I shall fetch you home on Fridays.’

I could not believe my ears. He was sending me away. The man who had loved me, who had bought me sweets and dolls that I’d kept in their wrappings, who had provided me with books and a shoulder to cry on … that same man was sending me away to live with a lot of other unwanted girls. ‘I’m not going there, either. If you don’t want me, I’ll go to Tommo’s, see if his mother and father will let me live with them till I’m old enough for work.’

He stared at me and there was nothing in his expression, no hatred, no anger and no love. ‘I will not have you wasting yourself on that boy. You are young and impressionable, and you might drift into an unsuitable relationship when you are older. He is a bad lot, Laura. Because of him, you have failed to get a free place at the County Grammar. But you will go to school and you will behave yourself. In years to come, you will realize that we made the best decision here today.’

I swallowed the tears, almost choked on my fury. ‘That’s the first time you’ve ever agreed with her,’ I yelled, waving a hand in the direction of my mother. ‘You’ve always been on my side, always, always. She used to hit me and you were nice to me when you came in from the shop. She hurt me, threw me about and banged my head on the wall. Even since we’ve lived here, she’s gone for me a few times. Miss Armitage came to see her about my slapped face, didn’t you, Miss? And then—’

‘Laura!’ Now my father was really shouting. ‘There is no need for all this.’ He turned to the vicar, then cast an
eye over Miss Armitage’s unhappy face. ‘Laura’s imagination never deserts her.’

Yet he had deserted me. After a while, I would begin to understand my father’s reason for such behaviour, his fear of being shamed before the representatives of such a small community. As the owner of the McNally works, he dared not allow his wife’s misdeeds to be widely broadcast. In time, I would know him, but on that evening in 1951, I simply felt betrayed.

When Tommo came the following weekend, we ran far from the village across farm and moorland until I had put enough space between my parents and myself. ‘I’m to go as a weekly boarder to the nuns,’ I gasped breathlessly. ‘Confetti’s all right, but she teaches the juniors, so I’ll never see her. It’ll be all Latin and stuff and I’ll be living with the awfullest nuns, the ones who don’t teach. They just pray all the time and scrub floors. It’ll be best if I run away and never come back.’

He lay on the grass and closed his eyes. ‘Where will you go?’

‘To your house.’

He laughed mirthlessly. ‘Mater and Pater wouldn’t allow it.’ He’d been calling his parents Mater and Pater since starting at Bolton School. ‘And you’ll be near me if you go to the nuns. My school’s a stone’s throw from the girls’ boarding house. I’ll come and throw stones at your window.’

I dropped down beside him. ‘This was all your idea, you know. You said you wouldn’t pass your scholarship, but you went and passed it. Then you said you wouldn’t work at school, promised you’d be a duffer and leave at fifteen so that we could run away to a circus or something. And you keep coming top of the class.’

He opened one eye. ‘Brains will out. I can’t help being brighter than most.’

He was so sure of himself, so wrapped up in his narcissism. But I adored him, could not see that I was being manipulated into a shape that suited him. ‘You’ll be
at Bolton School till you’re eighteen, then you’ll buggar off to some university a million miles away. I did what you told me to do. I answered hardly any of the questions on the papers, and they were dead easy. But you’re breaking your promise to me.’

He opened the other eye. ‘Look, one of us will need a good job. That’ll be me. Women stop at home and look after the house. No point in both of us working too hard at school.’

I was content. The proposal had not been formal, there had been no bending of the knee, no bunch of red roses. But Tommo had plans and I was a part of his scheme. ‘Anyway, you’re always missing school, always coming up to Barr Bridge and waiting for me.’

A cold expression took up residence on his features, as if he had chosen this facial aspect to disguise or hide a weakness. If he had a weakness, it was his need for me, his need for me to be exactly the girl he wanted. ‘How did she take it?’ he asked. There was no necessity for him to nominate the ‘she’.

‘All hankies and runny make-up. She says she’s done her best and I’ve let her down.’

He sat up, tore a piece of grass out of the ground, chewed on the white root for a second or two. ‘She’s doing a favour for somebody at the moment, but not for you and your dad. In fact, I’d say she’s in trouble.’

‘Why? And how do you know?’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘I’ve legs and eyes, haven’t I? She’s been knocking about with a policeman from Tonge Moor, a man young enough to be her son. They go in that sports pavilion at the back of Castle Hill School – the one near the railway embankment. I’ve listened to them.’

I swallowed, was afraid to ask. But I had to ask, was forced by factors elemental to find out the worst about Mother. ‘What do they talk about?’

Tommo laughed, but there was no joy in the sound. ‘They don’t talk. What they get up to leaves no room for words.’

I understood some of what he meant, had seen enough of animals’ behaviour to realize that odd things happened in the world of nature, but the details were still vague. ‘Tommo?’

‘Yea?’

‘What do they do?’ I was blushing, didn’t want a reply, desperately needed an answer.

‘They do it. You know what “it” is, don’t you? He goes inside her and she lets him. In fact, I’d say she likes it, judging by how she carries on, all moaning and shouting. But there’s more to it than that, Laura.’ He smiled the smile of a man who knows all the answers. There was no embarrassment in his face as he told me the language and the mechanics of a sexual encounter. ‘Anyway,’ he said when the details had made my face hot. ‘She’s been hanging round Mary Dunbar’s house.’

I didn’t know who Mary Dunbar was, and I was too ashamed to ask. No way could I imagine my mother doing what Tommo had just described with frightening clarity. I wanted to run away from him, too, because he had managed to make himself a part of an unpalatable world.

‘She’s a midwife,’ he announced.

‘Oh.’ What would Mother want with a woman who delivered babies?

‘She brings them into the world, but she also makes sure they never arrive in the first place. It’s a sideline. She doesn’t always do a good job. They say she can get a bit slapdash about cleaning her instruments. Some women call Mary Dunbar’s kitchen the torture chamber, but they still visit her when they’re desperate. Men aren’t supposed to know about it, but Art heard his mother talking one night about their next door neighbour. Their neighbour died in hospital after one of Mary Dunbar’s mistakes, but nobody spoke up. They’re too scared of sending Mrs Dunbar to prison, because she’s the only one who knows how to do it.’

Confusion reigned in my overloaded mind. ‘Do what?’

‘Get rid of the baby.’

‘What baby?’

He shook his head with impatience. ‘And you think you could have passed the scholarship? The baby that gets made in pavilions behind schools, of course. Or any other baby that gets made in a bed or up against a back yard wall. That’s what happens when men and women get together. They make babies, and babies aren’t always wanted.’

I began to shake with a violence that affected my teeth to the point where my tongue tasted of blood. Mother having a baby? Mother trying to get rid of a little baby? What would Dad say if he knew? I voiced this last thought when the shaking slowed.

‘It’s not his,’ said Tommo bluntly. ‘They don’t sleep in the same room, so they don’t do it. Your mother’s been doing it with other men for years, so if she had a baby, it wouldn’t be your dad’s.’

I nodded as understanding finally penetrated the cotton wool in my head. ‘Because they never do together the thing that makes the baby. And if she had a baby, Dad would be angry because of the policeman in the pavilion.’

‘Ten out of ten.’ The sarcasm in his tone was heavy. ‘Never mind, Laura,’ he said. ‘You’ll learn about it all in good time.’

I heaved myself away from him and ran home almost as quickly as I had fled from it just a few minutes earlier. For most of that journey, I hated Tommo with a passion that defied reason. He was saying bad things about a bad woman, and those things were probably true. But he had hurt me, hadn’t even tried to offer comfort and understanding.

There was no time, no space in my heart for diplomacy. I simply burst into the kitchen and came to a dead stop near the table. Mother was smoking and drinking tea. ‘You look like a tramp,’ she snapped.

‘Who’s Mary Dunbar?’

The cup dropped like a stone from her hand, split the saucer into two neat half-circles. Hot liquid poured into
her lap, but she was plainly visiting a place where physical sensation did not register. ‘What?’ she mouthed silently.

I was stammering, and the words came out disordered. ‘The policeman in the pavilion gave you a baby and Art’s neighbour died in Bolton Royal Infirmary after seeing Mrs Dunbar. She must have got the baby in the wrong place like you did and … I mean Art’s neighbour, not Mrs Dunbar got the wrong baby, and sometimes the instruments are dirty and you die in hospital when the baby’s already dead in the torture chamber.’

Her face was as white as one of Dad’s bleached work overalls. For several seconds, there was no movement in her, then she picked up her teaspoon and hurled it at my face, missed me by a mere half-inch. ‘Shut up,’ she hissed. Her mouth froze into a thin line, while the eyes grew huge, seemed to protrude from their sockets. ‘If I had the strength, I’d give you the hiding you’ve deserved for weeks,’ she muttered.

I backed away, afraid of her, almost afraid for her. Something was terribly wrong. Her face was paler than pale, was becoming the sort of white that I had seen emerging from a tub of Dolly Blue. All at once, she slumped forward into spilled tea and broken china, her hands dangling uselessly towards the floor.

It was difficult to know what to do. This was Saturday, and Dad always did his special work at the weekends, tended to get a bit experimental when the factory was empty. He would no doubt be in the laboratory with beakers and bunsens, would be weighing and measuring all those delicate herbs that went into his medicines. If I ran across and disturbed him just because Mother had fainted, then he might lose his place in the experiment, might be forced to start all over again. And I knew enough about human nature to understand that Dad didn’t care one jot about Mother.

In the end, the decision made itself. Beneath Mother’s chair there was a pool of liquid, a pale brown mess made by the spilled tea. But it continued to grow in volume and
began to change in colour as bright red spots dripped from the seat of her chair. She was bleeding to death. I was standing by and watching and doing nothing while my mother bled to death. Galvanized by terror, I flew down to Auntie Maisie’s, then sat in a frightened heap next to Anne while all the female adults in Barr Bridge went about the business of saving Liza McNally’s life.

‘She’ll be all right,’ whispered Anne, trying to comfort me.

The worst part of all this was the fact that I didn’t really care, because I’d never had much of a mother and I was able to take care of myself now. I didn’t love her, didn’t worry about her being in pain. But the flame of guilt raged healthily and fiercely in that part of the mind that craves to save humanity in a state of bodily integrity. I didn’t want her crippled, didn’t want her dead. It was an instinct that flourishes in all of us, yet it served only to confuse me. ‘She’s killed a baby,’ I said to Anne. ‘And it’s not Dad’s baby. That’s a secret even from Uncle and Auntie. My mother’s a bad woman.’

Anne pulled me close. I hadn’t bothered much with her since I’d decided to be a duffer. Duffer was one of Tommo’s terms, something he’d picked up from a Biggles book. ‘Anne, there was blood everywhere. She’s been to the midwife to get the baby killed, and Art’s neighbour died in hospital after the same thing. It would be awful if she died, as if I’d wanted it to happen. And what about that poor little baby?’

Anne’s face was nearly as white as Mother’s had been. ‘What about Uncle John? Has anyone told him?’

I sat up straight and thought about this. If anyone told Dad that Mother had been doing those things with another man, then there might be trouble. No. I remembered. I remembered the fat woman and Norma Wallace. They had known about Mother’s goings-on, and Dad had been told about one or both of those situations. So now I knew exactly what my mother had been doing with the screaming preacher. When she was supposed to be giving
out bits of charity, she was lying down somewhere, or standing up somewhere and … The pictures painted by Tommo were very clear. And Dad had known all along, had realized that his wife was performing these unspeakable acts with all sorts of men. No, this would not disturb him unduly. ‘He won’t care,’ I answered at last. ‘Because it’s not the first time, not the first man. She’s been doing things all over the place since you and I were little.’