September Starlings (45 page)

Liza McNally turned very slowly until she was facing the three of us. ‘You will be living with me, Laura. At least, you and the children will live in my house. I cannot give room to your fancy man, I’m afraid. He must make his own arrangements. But you must move in with me.’ She shook out the tiny veil, pulled it over her face, hid the workings of her wicked mouth. ‘I cannot be expected to run that factory single-handed. We shall hire a nanny for the children, then you will be free to go out to work. There is money to be made in the mechanization of all the processes at McNally’s. But I cannot undertake such demanding work alone. Of course, it will be in your own interests to come home, Laura. If you don’t, then I shall possibly sell the works and live on the proceeds. Your children’s legacy might be gone if I live a long life.’

A place as public as a lawyer’s porch would not have been my choice of venue for such negotiations, but since she had thrown down the gauntlet, I did not hesitate to pick it up. ‘Do as you like,’ I said, my voice carefully controlled. ‘I shall be staying with Frank.’

‘But he’s not your husband!’

I smiled, yet I knew that my eyes were cold. ‘Don’t try to lecture me, Mother. I’m a grown woman now with children of my own. The money is yours, so do as you please with it. Frank and I shall manage.’

Aunt Maisie gasped and pulled me backwards just as Mother raised a hand and slapped the air near my face. ‘Hateful girl,’ snarled the mean red mouth.

Uncle Freddie wrenched his arm from my grip, grabbed his sister-in-law’s wrist, stayed its course. ‘Too late for all that now, Liza,’ he said gruffly. ‘She’s getting on the big side for a clouting, a bit too old for you to go tormenting. We listened all those years, Maisie and I. We heard you and we hoped that our Laura took no notice of you. What you put her through was nothing short of cruel and—’

‘Shut up, you old fool,’ yelled Mother, every inch the fishwife in spite of expensive clothes and sweet perfumes.

Uncle Freddie cocked his head to one side. ‘Aye, I’ll keep me gob shut,’ he whispered. ‘’Cos I’m ashamed. We’re both ashamed, me and Maisie, we should have done something about you years back, when the lass was a babby. We kept our tongues still for the sake of John and for our little niece. But she’s an adult now, and he’s gone where your tongue can’t reach him. God love him, he should have tossed you in the ashpit when he saw the welts on his daughter’s face. But we’ll not talk, ’cos we failed John and Laura, so we’ve nowt to brag about. As for the job, I’d not work under you for a million quid a year.’

The teeth below the black netting were bared as Liza turned her venom on me once more. ‘Freddie Turnbull is beneath contempt,’ she sneered, ‘so I’ll not bother to answer him. But you, lady, will starve. Don’t come to me with your hand out, Laura McNally. I shall make that factory valuable without you. The chances we gave you! When I think of how I sent you to a decent school—’

‘An uncommon one, at least,’ I said. ‘We were never to be common,’ I told my sad companions.

‘And you married a failure, then ran off with his brother. Well, staggered off with a cripple. And remember, you’ve an illegitimate son to whom I am quite prepared to give a home—’

‘I’ll remind him of your generosity,’ I said.

‘And you throw the lot back in my face.’

I shook off Auntie Maisie and Uncle Freddie, stepped so close to my mother that I could smell her tainted breath. ‘Just stop all this, stop it now. My dad has just died, and you’ve no respect for the man he was and no remorse about him dying so young. There’s no love in you, no charity at all.’

‘You’re a cunning little bitch, aren’t you?’ she snarled. ‘Acting nice as pie, carrying on as if you’re perfect. If only the world knew what a nasty piece of work you are …’

I nodded. ‘Don’t worry about the world, Mother. I’m
sure you’ll manage to broadcast my sins – try the Home Service or the news on TV.’

She made a noise, something that sounded like a cross between a sob and a cough. ‘I told him where you were, you nasty little bugger. I told that Tommo creature how to find you, how to get hold of that cripple you ran off with. Oh yes, I put him in the picture.’

I could have killed her then, could have slaughtered her on the spot for causing so much pain to my father, to Frank, to me, my aunt, my uncle. The pressure on Dad to move us on yet again might just have been the final straw, the one that broke John McNally’s heart and stopped his brain … She had put that pressure there, had passed on the information that had caused everybody’s stress. I needed to get away. If I stayed, I would surely drown her with the venom of my words.

Uncle Freddie must have seen something in my stance, in my face, because he pushed past us, hailed a taxi and held the vehicle’s door wide until my mother had stepped inside.

I stayed with Auntie Maisie until the taxi had left the scene. ‘I’ll kill her,’ I said softly. ‘One day, I’ll really lose my rag and push her down the nearest flight of stairs.’

‘There, there.’ Auntie Maisie patted my shoulder. ‘Don’t be getting yourself into a fret. Feelings run high at times like these.’

‘She told Tommo where I was. I can’t believe that any mother would draw a map for a monster. She put a freak on the trail of her own child, her grandchildren.’

Maisie nodded pensively. ‘But you never told us, Laura. We had our own ideas, our suspicions, but we didn’t know for sure that Tommo was really bad. Perhaps she didn’t realize what she was doing. You don’t talk about him, so how could she have known that you had left him for ever?’

I leaned against the wall. ‘A real mother would know, Auntie. If it had been Anne, you would have known.’

She sighed. ‘Aye, I reckon I would, love.’

We walked to the van, squeezed ourselves into a narrow
seat, drove through town and out towards the rolling moors. Frank would be waiting for me. I didn’t know what our future would be, where we would live, how we would cope. But he was there just for me and the children. Perhaps I could stop running now. Perhaps Tommo would not loom so large in the corridors of my mind. The shortage of money was a small thing, a minor irritation. For peace of mind, for a world without Tommo and Mother, I was prepared to deny myself indefinitely.

I was exhausted for weeks after the funeral, too weary to plan a life. So we stayed put simply because neither of us had the energy for organization. Frank was quiet, withdrawn, watchful. He was probably waiting for Tommo; he was also waiting for me to buck up sufficiently for yet another change of location. About one aspect of life I was content. Uncle Freddie had accepted the enforced retirement, was making a good stab at shopkeeping.

Few alterations were done to the property in Barr Bridge, because Frank and I had no intention of remaining in the village. The local builder made a connecting door between the two houses’ upper floors, so that we could share facilities, but beyond that, we could not commit ourselves to expenditure that might be wasted. I, in particular, would eventually need to get as far away as possible from the area, from the gap left by my father. Mother had taken very well to widowhood, was shouting the odds all over the place. The factory was invaded by engineers, electricians, chemists, specialists in time and motion. When new machinery moved in, the buses became emptier, and rumour had it that many disabled people had been given their cards. Mother was on the up, so the rest of us could go down without wrinkling the surface of her gilt-edged pond.

Anne was the one who came up with an answer. She relayed her suggestion through Frank, who had taken a job at a stationer’s in Bolton. He came in one evening, joined me in a room above Auntie Maisie’s shop, played
with Gerald, put both boys to bed. Sometimes, he was so good that I almost wept with gratitude. He spent all day on his feet, often finishing up with dreadful pain in the bad leg, then he would come home and take over the children. ‘You’re too good to be true,’ I whispered in his ear. ‘Shall I go through and run a bath for you next door?’

‘No.’ He kissed me, pushed the fall of heavy hair from my face. ‘I saw Anne today. She thinks it’s time we stopped running.’

‘Oh yes? And who are we running from? Or should I say from whom are we running? God, there are bloody two of them, Frank. There’s Mother sacking the infirm and replacing them with automation, then there’s our darling husband stroke brother. Where the hell is he these days?’

Frank smiled at me. Whenever he smiled, it was like the sun peeping over cloud, bright and cheerful after the most dreadful of storms. He was a handsome man, quite broad and firm about the chest, solid except for the one wasted limb. His eyes always wrinkled at the corners, while the whole face seemed to reflect any merriment that happened to be taking place. ‘I love you, Laura,’ he whispered. ‘And I’m so happy to see you livening up again. Anyway, enough of frivolity. She came in for envelopes, paper clips and stuff.’

‘Who did?’

‘Anne did.’

‘Ah.’ I began to count the freckles on his arm, used a Biro to draw a line after fifty. This was a game we often played, as Frank’s freckles were profuse and impossible to number. It was the impossibility that had created the game. ‘Is this two or one?’ I asked as I started on the second fifty.

‘Siamese twins,’ he replied, rubbing at a freckle shaped like a number eight. ‘Or an amoeba caught in the act of simple fission. She’s found us a flat.’

I thought about amoebae in
flagrante delicto
, wondered how they might feel about being caught in the act. Then I
drew a heart just below his elbow, put our initials in it, a fancy L entwined with a curly F. ‘In Bolton?’

‘Yes. Laura, we can’t keep skipping about. I like working with old Mr Saunders. He’s talking about retirement, so he might just be looking for a manager in a year or two. I’ll never get a decent job with a decent wage if we carry on hopping all over the place. And we must consider the children. They’re young, I know, but they need some security of tenure. They don’t want to be waking up in a different house every six months.’

Frank was always sensible. ‘You’re always sensible,’ I said. ‘Without ever managing to be boring. Yes, we need our own place. I’ve not had my back scrubbed since we left Sale – imagine how dirty I must be.’ We needed privacy, the chance to be together properly, to live our life without even kindly spectators. I sighed, nodded, agreed with him. ‘It’s time to move on, darling, but I am so scared of him. It’s probably safe-ish here, simply because of the shop and all the comings and goings. But I don’t think I should be near Mother. I anger her, I’ve got on her nerves since the day I was born. The factory folk might be better off once I’m out of the way. She’s sacking everybody just to hurt me.’

He yanked off his tie, threw it on the floor, heaved at the left leg till it rested on a footstool. ‘Remember Cunningham’s furniture?’

‘Bradshawgate?’

‘That’s the one. Well, it’s closed down. The chap who’s taken over is opening several lock-up businesses on the ground floor. Anne’s flat is above what was the main showroom – it’s a newsagent’s now – and there’s another flat available. The beauty of it is that although it’s upstairs, the old lift is still there, the one that used to bring the furniture down to earth. You could use that when you’re fetching the pram into the street.’

I bit hard on my lip, begged the panic to go away. ‘But it’s still Bolton, Frank.’

‘Yes. If he wants to find us, he’ll find us in Cornwall or
Australia. This flat is a town dwelling, Laura. Bolton’s just about the biggest town in England, full of bustle and noise. We both felt like sitting ducks in the country, didn’t we? Well, didn’t we?’

‘Yes.’

‘So it has to be a town. Look, there’ll be Anne in the next flat. Even when she’s at work, she’s only a spit away from Bradshawgate. I’ll be working almost next door to the police station and you’ll have a phone.’ He massaged my shoulder, tried to squash out the tension. ‘You can’t live on the edge all the time, love. Sooner or later, you’ve simply got to relax or …’

‘Or what?’

‘Or be ill.’

I turned and looked at him solemnly. ‘You mean daft-ill, don’t you? You mean that I’m still letting Tommo get to me, even though I don’t see him every day. He’s still winning.’

‘They’re both losers, Laura. Bernard and your mother are miserable people who’ve tried to drag you down with them.’

I snorted. ‘Down? Mother’s never been so up!’

‘Only on the outside.’

‘She’s crowing, Frank.’

He dropped his chin and stared up at me, the grey eyes misted with concern. ‘It’s all a game. She’s like a child with the longest skipping-rope, the brightest colours on her spinning top. Inside, she’s sad, lonely because no-one wants to play with her.’

‘And Tommo?’

‘The same.’ He dropped the leg, stood up, smiled at me. ‘Except that he is really sick. He’s daft-sick, as you so aptly put it. Only there’s nothing amusing about my brother’s brand of insanity. Forget both of them, please. Let’s go out there and find some sort of a life.’

I reached out for him, careful to account for most of my own weight as he lifted me out of the seat. He was a strong man with two weaknesses – one in his leg, the other in his
heart. I thanked God that this lovely man had chosen me to occupy that gentle, caring heart. ‘OK, Buster. We’ll move. What about furniture?’

He grinned knowingly. ‘Cunningham’s left some bits and pieces, all a bit scarred and utility-ish. We’ll manage. We’ll always manage.’

As he led me to the bedroom, I held those words in my mind, clutched at them as if they were a life-raft. Frank was my saviour, and I lay down with him gladly. But there was no gratitude in my love-making. In that, there was only love.

Auntie Maisie had packed as if we were going off on a picnic that would last about a fortnight. We had tins of corned beef, soup, fruit and Spam. Four two-pound bags of sugar were wedged next to grease-proofed packages containing bacon, ham and cheese. She had even made curtains for our flat, and two lace-trimmed table cloths as covers for a barley-sugar-legged table that was scarred beyond repair, an item that had plainly been used when the Cunningham’s sales force had been brewing tea.