That Liverpool Girl (9 page)

She opened her door before he had time to knock. As usual, she had been at the window keeping an eye on her territory. ‘I’m coming in,’ he said, trying not to recoil too obviously when brushing past her hugeness. That was a good name for her. Her Royal Hugeness. It should be patented and hung round her neck with a bit of rope. Or a garrotte. He walked through the small shop, once a parlour, into the kitchen-cum-living room. The house smelled unclean, like rancid butter, dirty cloth and old paper. He turned and faced her. ‘I’m writing to the new owner of the estate,’ he began. ‘I have to give an account of everybody who lives round here.’

‘Oh, aye? The Liverpool woman what’s dad ran off with a cleaner?’

‘Yes.’ He bit back the words ‘at least she cleaned’.

‘And?’ The upper teeth dropped again. For a split second, she looked like something that lived under a bridge to frighten billy goats. She was quick, though. The set was clicked back into position in a fraction of a trice. He’d seen better-looking gargoyles acting as rainwater goods outside mansions and the like.

‘And people want you out. They daren’t say it to your face, and they’ll deny it if you ask, because they fear you. You’re a bully, and your brain’s smaller than your gob. Oh, and if anyone else complains about mail being interfered with, it’ll be the police that provide the transport to shift you. Stop steaming things open. Stop poking about in parcels and putting new string round them. We’re all on to you. Folk aren’t as daft as you want them to be.’

She dropped into a chair, which complained loudly at the sudden assault. ‘Who do you think you’re talking to, Keith Greenhalgh?’

‘You. I’m talking to you. You’re in a rent-free cottage, and we need space for evacuees.’

She almost managed to fold her arms across an upper body the size of Brazil. ‘So to keep me house, I have to take a bloody Scouser in?’

He shook his head. ‘Not likely. I wouldn’t put any child within a mile of you, Elsie Openshaw. Your own couldn’t get away quickly enough. Young Daisy threw herself at that farmhand until he impregnated her. Everyone along here knows that. They know how you treated Bill and the kids, and they know first-hand how you treat your neighbours. If I told them you were leaving, they’d have a bonfire, but the guy would be large and female. Even the blackout wouldn’t stop them celebrating seeing the back of you.’ There, he had done it. A peaceable creature by nature, this was hardly his forte. He wasn’t shaking. There was a chill in the air, that was all.

Her mouth opened and closed, Bill’s teeth shifting nervously in a cavern that threatened to inhale them, but no words emerged. A terrible fear visited her chest. Widows of long-serving farmhands were always housed. Sometimes, they had to share accommodation, but they were never thrown out. ‘Can she change things, just like that?’ she finally managed.

‘She can. So can I. It’s part of my job, Elsie. If any tenant, whether tied or rent-paying, makes life difficult for another or others, he or she will be given notice to leave. It’s in every agreement signed by a resident.’

The woman gulped.

‘Careful. You’ll be having Bill’s dentures for dinner.’ Keith sat down. ‘Two conditions. One, you clean this place up – it stinks. Two, you stop yapping about everything and everybody. Don’t put people off when they think about taking a Liverpool child. Those kiddies live in a huge port, and there’ll be ships, explosives and God alone knows what docked nearby. Sorry. Number three is the one I almost forgot. Leave the post alone, or I’ll have you out of here so fast your curlers’ll catch fire before you reach Willows Lane.’

Elsie struggled to her feet. ‘I’ve just remembered, there’s a letter for you.’ She went off towards the front room, which was now her precious shop.

‘Did you hear all I said?’ he shouted.

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

She returned. ‘Woman’s writing,’ she wheezed. ‘From Liverpool.’

‘Right.’ He stared at her. Was she the full quid, or was she a bent farthing? ‘Elsie?’

‘What?’

‘Did you hear my conditions if you’re going to stay here?’

She nodded, and her several chins wobbled, though not in harmony. It was as if they were fighting for space above a tight collar, and no one was winning. After a few seconds, the layers of blubber reached some sort of agreement and settled down, presumably to negotiate terms of peace. ‘Clean up, shut up, put up, and leave the bloody mail alone,’ she barked.

She was the full quid, then. ‘And stop being nasty to people and about people. Some teeth of your own might be a good idea, and all. Those you took from poor Bill are fit to frighten horses.’

Outside once more, Keith tried to contain his excitement. The writing wasn’t Hilda Pickavance’s. Miss Pickavance used as near as damn it to copperplate. He couldn’t imagine Nellie sitting down to write a shopping list, let alone a letter. It had to be from
her
. But he left it on the dresser while he brewed tea and lit the fire. Sometimes, a treat tasted sweeter if you had to wait for it. Her lettering on the envelope was clear, though this was not the hand of a formally educated person. Well, he wasn’t educated. Anything he knew had been picked up long after his escape from the confines of school.

He opened the envelope carefully with the help of some obscure item attached to a penknife of many parts, including a tool that had never in its life managed to remove a stone from an equine hoof.

He put down the page and smiled. She might talk oddly, but she was well-read, by gum. That paragraph might have been penned by Austen herself. He hadn’t been wrong; there was something special about Eileen Watson. But she wasn’t coming. Sighing, he picked up the letter again.

Travelling difficulties? If he had to steal an armoured vehicle from an army base, he would do it and be damned. And she had written ‘should’ like to spend time with family. So this was the source of Mel’s good brain, then. Like many born in the early years of the twentieth century, Eileen had experienced only a brief and unedifying brush with scholarship, but she had remedied that.

Oh, God. He was almost in love. The paper was thin and cheap, so he reused the envelope as protective custodian. ‘She wrote to me, not to Jay. She knew him better, because he did the driving, but she chose me.’ There had been a connection, a mutual attraction. More important, her humour was on show in the letter, and where there was humour, there was intellect. ‘Eileen.’ He tried the name for size and shape, rolled it from his tongue into the empty room. It seemed lonely out there by itself, so he paired it off with his own forename. ‘They’ll have me locked up,’ he advised the crackling fire. ‘I’ll get put away for talking to the fireback. But there’s no cure for this one.’

He stepped out of the kitchen into his back garden, fed his half-dozen friendly and inquisitive hens, picked some rhubarb for a crumble to be shared with the Dysons, and dead-headed a few flowers. A good enough housewife, Keith always helped his neighbours, since cooking for one was uneconomical and no fun. Jean baked his bread, so this tit-for-tat arrangement had been born long before Hitler decided to take over the world.

There was no treatment for this. It had been the same with little Annie Metcalfe of Bromley Cross. Little Annie had retained her full title, even after death, as there had been several Annes born that year, and the need to differentiate between them had birthed extended names. Even now, he could smell the sweet breath of an angel who had died in the sort of agony from which an animal would have been released within hours.

There was no mercy for gentle human souls, was there? He had never been unfaithful to his Annie. What happened between him and Cora Appleyard was mechanical, automatic, almost akin to breathing. He was grateful to her, as was she to him, but there was little or no pillow talk, because their joinings imitated the behaviour of animals. They had a need, and they indulged it. Until now, his heart had been the property of a dead girl.

The letter to Miss Pickavance could wait until morning, but the scribe in him itched to reply to one Mrs Eileen Watson. She had word-painted a picture of blood on the Mersey; he would return the favour by describing the gentle beauty of rural Lancashire, though he would not go over the top. What had she said? Something about not assuming too much after so brief an acquaintance. ‘And I’m sitting here with a daft grin on my face,’ he said. ‘But by heck, I’ll drag that one up the Willows, even if she has to come kicking and screaming.’ God, he was stupid.

Still laughing about the child who would be seven if Eileen allowed him to live until Friday, he toasted bread and scrambled a couple of eggs. A man who lived the country life had to keep his strength up. A cup of tea and a bit of music on the wireless, and he was set for the night. Keith Greenhalgh might be as mad as a frog in a box, but that was normal, since real love made a man crazy. He knew that. Because he’d been here before.

A flabbergasted Jean Dyson closed her mouth with a snap. She didn’t believe what she had just heard, yet she must believe it. Neil had a chance. There was a possibility – even a probability – that his occupation might be judged essential and reserved, because somebody had to show the Land Army what was what, so many of England’s farmers would be kept at home. ‘Why?’ she asked softly. ‘Why volunteer? If you sit it out, you’ll be too old to get called up.’ There was no point in screaming at him. If she shouted, he would go and sit with his cows in the shippon.

‘We got talking, me and Jay, and we decided it’s what we want. There’s no saying we’ll be picked anyway, so don’t start worrying yet. There’s every chance we’ll be psychologically unsuitable, or we won’t get through training for one reason or another. Then, as you said, there’s my age. If I volunteer, I’ll be considered.’

She cleared the table and began to clatter supper pots on the counter. She should have been in bed at least an hour ago, but she’d started knitting and lost track of time. ‘So you’re down the pub playing pat-a-cake with Jay, and you both come home fighter pilots.’ She poured hot water into the washing-up bowl. ‘How drunk did you have to be to get off the ground? I know he’s a daft beggar, but you should—’

‘Stop it, love.’

‘What was your fuel? Guinness or bitter?’

‘Jeanie—’

‘Don’t you Jeanie me.’ She waved a tea towel under his nose. ‘Leave this house voluntarily, Neil Dyson, and you won’t get back in. If you did get called up, you should have the sense to keep your feet planted on the ground. At sea, if the Germans don’t get you, the water will. In the air, you’ll become a ball of fire with two hundred bullets up your rear gunner. The army’s the only lot with a small chance. I knew I’d married a daft so-and-so, but it takes the whole cream cracker, this does.’

‘I’ve been reading, Jean, and—’

‘Then stop bloody reading. You’ve two daughters upstairs. Don’t you want to live for them?’

‘Course I do. I don’t want them raped by invaders either, don’t want them shoved into some prison camp then on to a breeding programme because they look Aryan.’