Birmingham Friends (7 page)

‘We shall let it go, shan’t we?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes – it’d be cruel not to.’

For a second I became aware of Olivia watching us, her brown eyes puzzled. Suddenly she twirled round, floral skirt dancing about her legs, and skipped over to William.

‘William, will you help me? I can’t seem to catch anything either.’

William picked up his bucket looking surprised, walked over to Olivia and squatted down, his thick legs bent up on each side of the pail. Olivia inclined towards him as if she had a secret to tell him, and William, startled, jumped back and overbalanced, sitting down suddenly.

Olivia let out peals of giggles. ‘What are you doing?’ she cried. ‘Here – let me pull you up.’

‘I can get up myself,’ William said crossly, with a flushed face.

She kept on at him all that afternoon: ‘William, will you help me? William, walk with me. Will you carry my bucket?’ I couldn’t understand this sudden attention paid to him, nor his passive response to her clamouring. If I’d carried on like that I was quite sure he’d have told me to leave off. Finally he did say gently to her, ‘Can you leave me alone for a bit now, Livy, eh?’

Pouting slightly, Olivia stepped over to me.

‘William’s being rather mean.’ She turned her head to look at him over one shoulder, coquettishly, strands of her chestnut hair half covering her face.

‘Just leave him alone for a while,’ I replied, carefully moving my net through the water. ‘Anyone’d think you’ve got ants in your pants this afternoon.’

I was so absorbed in helping Angus to release some more tiny fish into the bucket that it was some time before I noticed Olivia was crying.

‘Hey, what on earth’s the matter?’ I flung an arm round her slim shoulders, but she wriggled uneasily.

‘Come over here,’ Olivia said. She seemed all twitchy and strange. We left the boys and walked back up slowly under the trees towards the garden.

‘I feel so peculiar,’ Olivia sniffed. ‘It’s – Katie, I got my – you know – today.’

I turned to her, baffled.

‘My – when you become a woman.’ Olivia seemed to have to wring the words out of herself.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Gosh. I see. Your periods.’ Thanks to Granny Munro I knew all about those. ‘Bad luck. Is it making you feel rotten then?’

‘No. My tummy hurts a bit. It’s sort of gripy, down here.’ She laid a hand on the lower part of her stomach. ‘But it’s not that. I feel awfully queer. I’ve never felt like this before. As if I want something very badly but I don’t know what it is.’

‘Oh,’ I said again. I hadn’t the remotest idea what Livy was talking about.

‘And when I told Mummy about it, she got all cross and then started crying. It’s made me feel awful.’

I was astonished. Hoping to cheer Livy up, I said, ‘Never mind. Let’s go in and have some tea before you have to go. Mrs Drysdale’s made shortbread and there’s chocolate cake.’

Olivia burst into tears all over again.

‘What’s up now?’ I cried.

‘I don’t know.’ She was wiping her face with her hanky. ‘It’s just how I feel.’

When we got inside, Mummy seemed to have calmed down. Her meeting was over.

‘Well, you look like a wet weekend,’ she said briskly to Olivia in her best nursing sister tone. ‘Where are the boys?’

‘Coming,’ I said.

We sat in the kitchen and Mrs Drysdale poured tea for us all from the big brown pot with its green and orange knitted cosy. I loved the kitchen. It was warm and steamy in winter with the range going full blast and cool in summer with its dull red quarry tiles and shady atmosphere.

We all sat round the table, Mummy with her thin body quite upright, as if she had a steel bar up the back of her blouse. She had fastened her hair up again at the back and it waved neatly round her face. She was wearing a moss-green cardigan which had a tie of braid at the neck.

‘You’ve got so much on, Mummy,’ I exclaimed, looking at her. ‘It’s such a boiling day!’

‘It may be outside,’ she replied as she sliced up the moist cake, a smooth ridge of butter icing between the two layers, ‘but I’ve been in sorting out this parish work.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘Sorry. I forgot.’ I always seemed to say the wrong thing.

‘Your father’s going to be late.’ I wondered why she was even commenting on the fact since Daddy was late almost every day. ‘Sometimes I don’t know why he doesn’t take a truckle-bed and go and sleep in the surgery.’ She checked herself, remembering that Mrs Drysdale was still working over by the sink. Mummy pointed at the ceiling. ‘I take it she’s quietened down?’

‘She’s all right,’ I assured her, glad I’d managed to do something right. ‘And she’s promised faithfully to be as good as gold from now on.’

‘Well,’ Mummy said drily. ‘I’ll believe that when I see it.’

‘Can I come with you, Daddy? Please?’

He hesitated over his boiled egg, not meeting my eye. William was scraping his toast with irritating loudness so that charred black crumbs dusted his plate.

‘I don’t think so,’ Mummy intervened abruptly. ‘You haven’t been down there for years. You’re too old.’

‘What your mother means,’ Daddy said, his manner less harsh than Mummy’s, ‘is that you might find some aspects of it rather unappealing at your age. You were just a little girl when you used to come before.’

Occasionally as a small child I’d gone down to the surgery with Daddy and sat in the corner of the drab waiting-room with my colouring pad and crayons, amid all the coughing and sighing and complaining about things I couldn’t understand. I was curious, hungry to see my father’s other life. It was the very fact I might now be able to make more sense of it all that attracted me. And Granny had supported me. I think she hoped it might bring Daddy and me closer.

‘And the patients wouldn’t like it either,’ Mummy said, sniffing. She had a heavy summer cold and would have been feeling very sorry for herself had she ever permitted indulgence in such emotions.

‘I think you should go,’ William said, taking an enormous mouthful of toast and speaking through it. ‘The sight of you would shock them all into feeling better. Either that or finish them off altogether.’

‘William!’ Mummy said.

I scowled, and Daddy pretended the conversation wasn’t happening, a tendency of his which I found hugely aggravating.

‘This is not just a game,’ I said. ‘I really do want to come.’ In my enthusiasm I knocked over my egg cup and Mummy tutted.

My father wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘No one’ll object,’ he reassured Mummy. ‘Katie seems interested in looking after people. You do wonders with your granny after all, don’t you?’

My mother buttered her toast in silence.

‘You don’t mind, do you Mummy?’

She looked up, tight-lipped. ‘Why should I mind? I’m just thinking of your health – all those germs. But your father’s the doctor. I was only a nurse, after all, so what do I know?’

Having to abandon her job as a children’s nurse on marrying Daddy was a sacrifice about which she had never ceased to feel bitter.

Daddy pushed back his chair, ignoring this remark as he tended to blank out all such expressions of emotion. ‘I’ll be leaving in ten minutes.’

I sat in the passenger seat next to Daddy, nervous at being alone with him. We turned into the Alcester Road, the Austin shuddering on cobbles and tramlines, swooping downhill from the fresher air of Moseley towards the lower-lying, smoky atmosphere of Balsall Heath, two miles from the middle of Birmingham. Daddy’s surgery was on the inner edge of this area, in St Joseph’s parish, with its hotch-potch of dilapidated back-to-back houses, and workshops and factories all squeezed in together, its life altogether louder and more public than in our suburban street. What would it be like to live here? I wondered. I was seeing everything with new eyes today, alert suddenly to these differences. Both my father and Alec Kemp moved daily between these two contrasting areas, both able to afford houses in prosperous, tree-lined Moseley. The surgery was in the Birch Street area, only streets away from Kemp’s Foundry Supplies.

I eyed Daddy’s profile, his neatly trimmed dark hair, the little moustache and tired blue eyes, every line of him dutiful and serious.

He cleared his throat. ‘I gather you managed to settle your grandmother down yesterday,’ he said in the objective voice he always used when speaking of her, sounding as if he was discussing one of his patients.

‘She took all her clothes off in the drawing room again.’ I saw him flush slightly and wondered if I’d said the wrong thing. I couldn’t always work out what I was supposed to say to my parents. One minute they were talking about patients and illnesses and bits of bodies, some of which I knew you didn’t refer to, even in Latin, in polite company. Then at other times if you mentioned something, especially if it was to do with the family, they’d go all stiff and embarrassed. It was very confusing.

‘Why did Granny come and live with us? She could have managed on her own, couldn’t she?’

‘It seemed the most practical thing, after your grandpa Robert died. North Berwick’s a long way off and it made sense for her to be near her family.’

‘But we’re not her only family.’

‘We were the ones who were able to have her. The others have commitments which made it impractical for them.’

‘But I don’t think she’s very happy. And she and Mummy can’t stand one another.’

Daddy was silent for a moment. I looked out as we passed the ornate red-brick bathhouse on the Moseley Road.

‘It always takes families time to adjust to new arrangements – particularly people who are above a certain age. Three months is not a very long time in that situation.’

What situation? I wondered. We were talking about Granny, not some situation. I sat in silence. Whatever the reasons she was here I thanked God she had arrived, like a bracing gust of wind from north of the border.

We turned into a side street and parked outside the surgery. I squinted myopically at the brass plaques.
Dr. W. Munro
, and underneath,
Dr. J. Williamson
. I hoped I shouldn’t see sour, bad-tempered Dr Williamson.

‘It needs a polish,’ I said.

‘Well, there’s a little job for you then.’

A line of people were already waiting outside by the step. Daddy raised his hat and greeted them. One of the women, tight-faced, held a silent baby. An elderly man was coughing, bent over by it, his lungs sounding drenched.

The waiting-room was dark, the walls painted brown. There were wooden benches against three of the walls and in one corner stood a small table and two chairs. In the fourth wall a door, through which Daddy disappeared, led out to the two consulting rooms at the back, and there was a little trapdoor for the dispenser.

I was just settling myself down at the table when my father reappeared, hurrying across the waiting-room.

‘Dr Williamson is going to handle the start of surgery. I have some urgent calls to make. Won’t be too long.’

‘Oh, let me come.
Please
let me!’ It seemed very important that day that I see everything.

He had no time to spare for discussion. ‘Come on then, quickly.’ He was already going out of the door. ‘None of them is too far. It’ll be easier to walk.’

It was a humid day, warm and cloudy, threatening storms. We hurried along the crowded pavement of Birch Street past rows of shops, their blinds slanting out over the pavement. Everything seemed colourful, absorbing. Each shop gave off its own special smell: the warm, fleshy smell of sides of meat padded with yellowed fat, fresh bread and burnt currants, the tangy sweetness of strawberries and the bitter smells of metal and rubber from the hardware shop. Mixed with this was the ripe whiff of horse manure from the road.

I followed Daddy into another side street, hurrying to keep up with him, he striding and I trotting.

‘Here we are.’ He knocked on the door of a house. ‘You’d best stay outside, I think. Old Mr Fenton has his bed downstairs now.’

The house was run-down and filthy, the windows so thick with grime that they must have let in very little light. There were signs that the paint on the bleached window frames must once have been blue.

A woman with a large, sagging face and a wart sprouting whiskers on her left cheekbone appeared at the door. The rest of her hair was wrapped in a washed-out brown scarf. As the door swung open a waft of stale air hit us, stinking of sweat and urine. I shrank back.

‘Oh, it’s you, doctor,’ the woman said lifelessly. ‘He’s bad today.’ She talked of a turn in the night, said she was sorry for having to bring the doctor out. My father gently dismissed the apology.

The woman left the door ajar and I peered in. I could see a bed with a heavy wood headboard, covered by old grey blankets. Propped against the pillows was a yellow face, so shrunken that it seemed not to be living at all but a mask, something out of an old tomb. The head was bent back slightly so that the nose pointed at the ceiling. The old man was struggling for breath, his lungs making a terrible rattling sound.

I had expected to feel afraid or repulsed, but I found I was looking at him with a detached kind of pity. He was dying, clearly. He appeared to be at a distance from us already, as if death had moved in and taken possession before life was extinguished.

I watched my father bend over the bed and take the old man’s hand tenderly from under the bedclothes to feel his pulse. He spoke a few soft words. ‘Easy now,’ I heard him say. His daughter stood at the end of the bed with her arms folded across her large breasts.

Daddy turned to her. ‘There’s nothing more I can do, I’m afraid. You’re doing the best that can be done.’ The woman sighed and nodded stolidly and kept thanking Daddy before we left.

As we approached the next house, two children who had been waiting on the front step came running at the sight of the doctor, cheeping like young birds: ‘It’s the babby – he’s took real bad!’

They were both girls, both dressed in very worn gingham frocks, too big for the elder girl and too skimpy for the younger.

‘Our mom’s worried it’s the diphtheria or she’d have brought him to you.’

I stepped into the house with Daddy. The room was spotlessly clean, though with very little in the way of furniture. There was the black iron range, a table and two wooden chairs.