A Daughter's Duty (3 page)

Rose waited, her muscles tense, listening to the noises from downstairs. After a while, the square of light which showed on the landing from the kitchen below went out, the middle door downstairs closed softly. Rose relaxed slowly, for tonight at any rate her dad had gone to bed.

‘I want to stay on at school,’ Marina said to her mother. ‘I want to go to university.’ It was a few weeks later and almost the end of the school holidays.

‘I had to leave school at fourteen and go away to a place in Lancashire,’ replied Kate. She was standing at the table rubbing fat into flour for the pastry crust of the meat pie she was making for dinner, which was at five o’clock today, Sam and Lance being on back shift.

Marina sighed. She’d heard all about how her mother had to go away to work when she was only fourteen but that had been in the bad days of the twenties, for goodness’ sake. She tried again.

‘Mam, you were as pleased as punch when I passed for the grammar school. You knew it meant I would have to stay on longer at school.’

‘You’re staying ’til you’re sixteen, aren’t you? Why, man, you should be able to get a good job in an office then. No scrubbing floors or washing clothes for a living for you.’

Marina tried a different tack. ‘I’d get a grant, you know, if I got into university.’

Kate picked up the jug of water and tipped a little into the pastry mixture. Marina stood by her side and watched as she mixed a while with a blunt knife then tipped more water into the bowl and mixed again. Eventually Kate reckoned she had the right consistency and put down the knife. She mixed and shaped the lump of pastry with her hands before flouring the board and picking up the rolling pin. Marina watched, diverted for a moment or two for when she tried to do it the dough was always too sticky or too dry. And when she asked her mother how much water, Kate never knew. ‘Just ’til it’s right,’ she said. Still, Marina reckoned her mother used about a quarter of a pint. She would remember that next time she tried.

Forgetting about the pastry, Marina returned to the issue of her schooling. ‘Grandma left school when she was nine and went out to work but she didn’t make you do the same, did she, Mam?’

‘Now, Marina, don’t try to argue with me. I’ve told you, you don’t have to leave on your birthday, you can stay on and try for your School Certificate. A lot of girls won’t even be let do that.’

With an air of having said the last word she was going to on the subject, Kate deftly lifted the crust and laid it over the steak and kidney. Marina knew it was a waste of time arguing after that. Feeling frustrated, she began to clear up the baking things and took them into the large pantry, where Dad had recently had a white enamel sink installed. Mam had been so pleased with the sink, she thought as she sluiced the baking board down with cold water. The tap had been moved over from its former place on the back wall and though there was only cold water, it was a tremendous improvement. Before that the washingup had had to be done in a dish on the kitchen table with an old tin tray for a draining board. The present draining board was just a piece of board put up by the plumber but at least it sloped into the sink.

Marina brought hot water from the boiler in the range and began the washing-up proper. By, she thought, it would be lovely to have a proper kitchen like the one in the pre-fab bungalow which Peggy up the street had been allocated by the council. The pre-fabs were from America and not only had proper kitchens and bathrooms but there was a refrigerator in the kitchen too. Oh, luxury! Peggy made ice cream with evaporated milk and had let Marina have a taste one time when she was baby-sitting little Clive, Peggy and Tony’s asthmatic baby, the reason why Peggy had been allocated a pre-fab in the first place. Marina’s tastebuds, starved by the long years of monotonous food in the war, had gone mad. She’d felt it was the nicest thing she had tasted in her life, for she couldn’t remember what things were like before the war, not really. Dad sometimes brought ice cream home from the pit canteen but he worked at Leasingthorne and that was miles away and the ice cream was all runny by the time he got home.

Marina’s sunny nature was restored by the time she had finished the washing-up and wiped down the board and sink. She rinsed out the cloth and hung it over the edge to dry, for though the day was cooler, heralding the coming of the autumn, it was still August and there were germs about, not least from the ash closet at the other end of the yard. She grimaced as she pictured in her mind’s eye the wriggling germs on the slides they had taken turns to look at in science class. And they hadn’t been anything special, either, just everyday germs which Miss Mather said were everywhere!

By, it must be grand to be able to study them in a real laboratory, not just the labs at school. To be able to spend all your days doing that and getting paid for it. Or learning to be a doctor maybe. She would love to be a doctor, though she had never breathed a word about that ambition to anyone, not even Rose. And now, since her friend was working, she seemed more grown up and distant somehow, passing Marina in the street-with only a word and not stopping for a chat as they had always done before. Big Meeting Day had been the exception, Rose had been her old self, then a few days later she’d answered her friend’s greeting with only a mumbled hallo and looked away.

‘How’s your mother?’ Marina had asked, determined to find out what was wrong.

‘A bit better, thanks,’ mumbled Rose, not looking at her. ‘I have to go now, there’s the twins …’ And she had hurried off.

Marina sighed and filled the bucket with water, gathering the slab of yellow soap and scrubbing brush and floorcloth. It was her job to scrub the lavatory seat at the end of the yard and since seeing what germs looked like she tried to find time to do it most days. There’d be just time before the dinner was ready.

Rose did have to pick up Mary and Michael that day, they had to go to the school dentist in Auckland. She had had to take the afternoon off work.

‘How often is this going to happen then?’ Mr Jones had asked grumpily. He was the foreman and always looked grumpy. ‘You know it’ll come off your wages? And who am I going to put on the band in your place?’

‘I’ll work through the dinner hour,’ she said. ‘Anyroad, you know I’m faster than anybody else. I’ll make it up, I promise. Only me mam’s bad, I told you, and somebody has to take the twins to the dentist. I had to put oil of cloves on our Michael’s tooth last night, the poor bairn was crying with it.’

Mr Jones shook his head, but still he let her go when the time came. He wasn’t so bad, the girls on the band agreed.

So here she was running into the infants’ school to pick up the kids and only five minutes to get to the bus to Bishop.

Sitting in the waiting room holding on to Mary so that she didn’t go running into the surgery after her brother, Rose felt she had been running for half the day and the other half she had been sewing furiously, side seam after side seam, so she could get ahead and not have so much to make up tomorrow. Well, at least Mary had stopped struggling now and she could relax. ‘Watch the trees, pet,’ said Rose. ‘Aren’t they bonny now?’

Mary nodded her head and leaned against Rose’s knee while they both watched the leaves, turning russet now, through the tall windows of the old mansion on the high ridge above Auckland. Ninefields, it was called, though it was surrounded by houses, but Rose supposed that when it was built by an ironmaster of long ago, it had been surrounded by fields. Marina had told her that Elgar had stayed there often, being a friend of the ironmaster, and by, she could almost hear his music in the rustle of those trees. She sat back in her chair and stroked Mary’s fine, dark hair, thinking of that long ago time.

A wail from the surgery shattered the moment. Mary started to cry. She wanted to go in and see what the nasty man was doing to her brother, but then she didn’t want to go in for the nurse came for her and it was her turn.

‘It’ll only be for a minute or two, Mary,’ Rose promised. ‘If you’re a brave girl I’ll buy you both a paper windmill on the way home. And we’ll go into Rossi’s and you can have lemonade and drink it through a straw.’

‘Michael an’ all?’ the girl stipulated and Rose agreed. And before long they were walking down the hill into the town, the twins short of a back tooth each, but they were milk teeth and would grow again. The dentist had promised Mary they would before she agreed to sit in his chair and let him look in her mouth.

Rossi’s, the coffee shop on the corner, was full of the grammar-school crowd and Rose was lucky to find a booth. But she did and sat in a corner while the twins sucked noisily at their straws, all thoughts of the dentist forgotten. She saw Marina come in with her friends, the girls in bottle-green tunics and the boys in dark red blazers.

Rose felt herself shrink back in the booth instinctively. She didn’t want to be seen in her old work coat for she hadn’t had time to change and knew her hair was in need of washing. She felt decidedly scruffy before the grammar-school crowd. Marina looked like a stranger to her somehow and years younger than she herself, just a bairn really, laughing and carrying on with her mates. Though she came over to them readily as soon as she saw them, beaming a welcome.

‘Hallo, Rose,’ she said. ‘You’re all right, aren’t you?’ she went on, turning to the twins. ‘The dentist isn’t so bad.’ And they looked at her with big eyes over the rims of their lemonade glasses and said nothing, taking their cue from Rose who couldn’t think of anything to say anyway. Which was silly, Marina had been her friend for years, hadn’t she? But now she seemed a world away. After an awkward minute, Marina rejoined her school friends. ‘Well, I’ll see you later, Rose,’ she said. ‘We’ll catch up on the gossip, ah?’

‘Yes, we will. See you later,’ echoed Rose, and the gulf between her and her friend made her want to cry.

‘Howay then, pets,’ she said briskly, covering up the moment of emotion. ‘Drink up. We have to catch this bus.’

And they had gone out by the back door, and as far as Rose could see Marina never noticed them go. They ran for the bus, the twins holding out their windmills to catch the breeze and shouting with excitement as the coloured strips of paper whirled round.

‘Marina Morland, please.’

The woman stood back and tipped her head enquiringly and Marina stepped forward and through the door. The room was vast with a thick carpet on the floor and an enormous desk behind which sat the Treasurer and another man, his deputy, Marina supposed. The Treasurer was old, older than her dad, easily fifty. And he had rimless glasses which reflected the light so she couldn’t see his eyes.

‘Sit down, Miss Morland,’ he said, kindly enough, so she sat down on the chair before the desk and tried to hide the fact that she wasn’t wearing stockings or gloves by tucking her legs under her chair and her hands under her bag. She’d noticed while she was waiting that all the other candidates wore stockings
and
gloves.

The Treasurer was looking at a paper in front of him. He finished and handed it to the other man, nodding slightly.

‘You wouldn’t mind travelling from Bishop Auckland to Durham every day, Miss Morland?’ he asked.

‘Miss Morland’. She had never been called that before; it didn’t sound as though he was actually addressing her but her father’s sister, whose intended had been killed at Dunkirk and who swore she would never marry, though Mam said she still saw that look in her eye whenever there was an attractive man present.

‘No.’

Ten minutes and a few searching questions later she was running down the steps of Shire Hall, smiling with relief at being released. She still didn’t know if she’d got the job or even if she wanted it, but if she had to go out to work instead of taking her Higher she supposed Durham City wasn’t a bad place in which to work. She turned up the road into the city centre, lingering by the steps leading down to the water from Elvet bridge, looking at the line of punts and rowing boats drawn up by the boathouse on the edge of the river. Further along, trees and bushes framed the curve of the river and covered the steep bank side below the cathedral.

The sun broke through the clouds and glinted on the water and on the river a punt glided along smoothly, the pole handled expertly by a boy, a student probably. A girl sat quietly, her hand trailing through the water at the side of the boat. She lifted her head, listening to something the boy was saying, and Marina felt a momentary pang of envy. Did she know how lucky she was? But Marina was not one to be envious of anyone else for long and, after all, what did she know of the girl’s life? Good luck to her, whoever she was.

She climbed the steep hill into the market place and saw by the town hall clock that she had just missed a bus to Bishop Auckland, so she went into a cafe and got a cup of coffee, taking it to a table by the window where she could look out. She sipped the coffee slowly, making it last until the bus was due.

It was market day and watching the people crowding round the stalls, she didn’t at first notice the lad pause at the window. When he tapped on the glass she looked at him, startled. It was that friend of her Yorkshire relatives, the one she had met at the Big Meeting. He waved and indicated he was coming in and the events of that day last summer flashed through Marina’s mind. She flushed with embarrassment.

‘Marina, isn’t it? You remember me, don’t you? Charlie Hutchinson, OK if I sit here?’ Without waiting for answers he sat down opposite her and signalled to the waitress. ‘You’d like another cup?’ he said to Marina, and ordered for them both in spite of her demurral.

He was tall and gangling and his mop of dark hair fell into his eyes. He swept it away impatiently every few minutes, hardly noticing he was doing it. He had a quick, almost nervous way of moving and talking, which he did almost all the time, pausing only for Marina’s replies. He drank his coffee black with three spoonfuls of sugar and leaned his elbows on the table, holding the cup in both hands as he talked. His hands were narrow with long lean fingers and clean nails cut straight across.