Chocolate Girls (2 page)

She was jerked out of her reverie by the sound of a stifled sob coming from the woman who was standing in front of Ruby. Edie felt she recognized her. It was hard to tell her age, but she’d be a bit older than herself and Ruby, with curling chestnut hair fastened in a bun, but from which uncontrollable corkscrews of hair had escaped and curled round her forehead and ears. The woman had a curvaceous, motherly figure, rather busty, and was dressed in a neat tweed skirt, a black cardigan buttoned over her white blouse and low-heeled, though stylish brown shoes. She was weeping quietly and intensely into her handkerchief. Edie watched her shaking shoulders, pitying her. She could tell the woman was mortified at having broken down in the street. She wore round, tortoiseshell spectacles and every so often pushed them up to wipe her eyes, but even as she did so the tears were replaced by more. Edie nudged Ruby.

‘She’s at Cadbury’s, ain’t she? Clerical, or accounts or summat?’

Ruby shrugged. The bus had just pulled into view and she was sorting out her pennies.

The weeping woman fumbled to find her purse and her handkerchief dropped to the ground at Edie’s feet. As she didn’t appear to notice, Edie picked up the sodden little square of cotton and cautiously touched the woman’s arm.

‘’Scuse me – you dropped this.’

‘Oh!’ Startled, she turned round, obviously embarrassed, trying to keep her head down. ‘So sorry. Thank you.’ She had a nice face, Edie thought. Not a looker, just kind and friendly, even though her eyes and nose were red and blotchy.

‘If I had a clean one I’d give it yer,’ Edie said.

The woman glanced up and tried to produce a smile on her distraught features.

‘Oh – not at all. But you’re very kind.’ The bus growled to a halt beside them and she turned away and climbed inside.

Ruby, one foot on the step said, ‘T’ra then.’ As the bus moved off, Edie saw Ruby’s plump features, thick hair scraped back from her face as she leaned towards the window to wave.

Janet Hatton climbed down from the bus in Navigation Street, her damp handkerchief still clutched in one hand. Heading for New Street in the soft evening light, she fumbled in her bag for the packet of Players with shaking fingers. The packet had long been crushed deep in the bag with a box of Swan matches, under her little makeup bag, hanky and purse.

‘Oh no, I never smoke,’ she would tell people when cigarettes were offered round on social occasions. And she didn’t smoke, at least not in her real life. She lit up, praying there was no one about who would recognize her.

She was early. Six o’clock sharp, he’d said. It was a quarter to. She lingered near the Council House, trying to make the cigarette last. She always tried not to inhale much of the smoke as it burned her throat, but she had come to find comfort in the habit of smoking, the smell of the unlit tobacco, and in what she felt was its vulgarity. It would appall Mummy, and that was all part of the attraction. It made her feel seductive, a woman of the world suddenly, which even at twenty-five she had never succeeded in feeling before. Alec’s kisses, the admiration in his eyes, the way he laughed at things she said, the way
she
laughed now, more than ever before, the helpless, shameful excitement of it all – all these things had become tied into the smoking of a cigarette, which she had also never done before she met him, and until . . . Oh Lord, but tonight she despised herself bitterly for it. For all of it. Tonight all the tobacco tasted of was fear and dread.

The spindly arm of the museum clock said five to six. The cigarette had made her feel sick. Throwing away the butt, she took out her powder compact, dabbed her nose and put on some lipstick, peering into the little mirror, holding it close as her spectacles were not quite strong enough. At least they hid her red eyes. She smoothed her cardigan over her hips, patted her hair, turning to look at her reflection in one of the shop windows. Her shadowy face looked back, bespectacled, topped by her foolish mop of curls, the picture completed by her dismal, glamourless clothes. And she saw what no one else could yet see: a silly, cheap little secretary, duped into carrying a bastard child.

‘That’s what they’ll all say.’ Her lips actually moved. ‘You stupid, ridiculous little fool!’

The despair which had brought on her tears after work rose up and swamped her again. Janet was so appalled at herself. Here she was, a respectable young woman, a Quaker who was supposed to have high ideals, throwing everything away to run helplessly after this man. This man whose eyes and words and hands shocked her into an excitement she had never known before, aroused such desire in her, and whom she had to creep about to meet, to lie and pretend because she was not part of Alec’s real life with his wife and small son.

In the shop window, another reflection came and stood beside her own and she jumped.

‘Alec!’

‘Kitten!’ He smiled, handsome as ever, and there was no doubting the warmth in his smile, but at the same time his blue eyes were flickering beyond her nervously, to see if there was anyone who might see them, who might reveal his secret to Jean, his wife.

‘How’s tricks?’ Alec steered Janet gently but firmly back along the street. ‘Come on – got a surprise for you.’

‘Oh,’ she said helplessly, while her mind screamed, ‘No! You’ve got to tell him now!’

‘Just round the corner. Come on!’

She followed, looking up at the profile of this man who in his need had picked her out, had made her feel desired and honoured. He had a sturdy build, clipped black hair and moustache and a ruddy, cheerful complexion.

Round in Margaret Street he stopped suddenly. ‘There!’

Janet looked, trying to get her breath. ‘Where? What is it?’ There was nothing extraordinary, a couple of cars parked at the kerb, a scattering of passers-by.

He pointed at one of the cars. ‘John Spiller’s lent me his Austin. I told him I had a few errands to run this evening. Hop in quickly, will you?’ In case anyone saw, of course.

‘But Alec, no! Look, there are things I need to say to you. And I said to Mummy I shouldn’t be back very late.’

‘And you won’t be.’ He slipped off his jacket and smiled reassuringly at her across the roof of the car, fingers tapping, wanting to be off and away. ‘Come on, kitten – we can talk on the way.’

Edie walked down Charlotte Road, one of a little grid of streets tucked, along with the infirmary and the Alliott engineering works, into a pocket of land between the main road, the wharf and the railway. Each of the four streets was long enough for two rows of forty or more tightly packed terraces facing each other, their tiny strips of back garden with outside lavatories and wash-houses, each one shared between two houses. When the builder, a Mr Glover, had put up this sturdy neighbourhood soon after the turn of the century, he named the streets after his family. The side road was Kitty Road, and off it fed Charlotte, Minnie and Glover.

Charlotte Road sloped gently downhill in the direction of the works and the wharf behind it. The Marshalls’ house, number twenty-seven, was about half-way down. At the very bottom of the street two shops faced each other: on the other side was Higgins’ hucksters shop, which sold everything from gas mantles to mops and buckets, and on their side was her dad’s business, Dennis Marshall: Gentlemen’s Barbers. Dennis Marshall was a short, barrel-chested man, spruce and upright, nails always scrubbed clean, absent from home as much as possible. As a small girl Edie had sometimes had to go and deliver a message to him, self-conscious as she stepped in her buttoned boots through the door, into that mysterious aura of sweat and shaving cream and male banter, of fuzzy little piles of hair sweepings on the floor. Some of them would say, ‘Awright bab – Dennis, ’ere’s yer littl’un come for yer!’ and tease her or chuck her cheeks. This was her father’s little kingdom. The one place he seemed happy.

Jack’s family, the Weales, lived at number forty-seven. The front of the house badly needed a lick of paint, and as she passed, she could hear Mrs Weale’s voice raised, moaning as usual, along the entry. Jack wouldn’t be back in yet. Edie hurried past, threads of her prospective mother-in-law’s voice trailing after her down the road. She and Jack were rescuing each other.

Rodney, her ten-year-old brother, was out playing on the pavement with a bunch of other kids. You could see his carrot-topped head a mile off, flying after a ‘cat’ – the little block of wood used for ‘tipcat’, their game craze of the moment. Seeing Edie they shouted, ‘Eh, Rodney’s sister – gorrany choclit for us?’

‘You know I ain’t, so why bother asking?’ she retorted.

Rodney, playing the big man in front of his pals, thumbed his nose at her.

‘Same to you.’ She went down the entry and along the little path to the back of number twenty-seven, then realized she was still carrying Ruby’s bag. Sticking her head through the open back door, through which drifted the smells of boiled greens and Bisto, she shouted, ‘Mom – I’m back! Just dropping Ruby’s overall round.’ She didn’t expect a reply and didn’t get one.

Ruby lived in Glover Road. When she and Edie had met at their first Cadbury’s interview, aged fourteen, Miss Dorothy Cadbury, with her kind eyes, old-fashioned clothes and hair coiled into ‘headphone’ plaits above her ears, had set them some little puzzles to do, then checked their hands and nails. No one would be taken on at the works if they had warts or other blemishes on their fingers. Then she asked them questions, starting with when were they born?

‘October the nineteenth, nineteen-twenty,’ Edie said.

When Ruby, next in line, offered the same answer, Miss Dorothy frowned. ‘I mean
your
date of birth,’ she said. ‘Not hers.’

‘That is mine,’ Ruby said, going red. ‘It’s the same.’

Being accepted by Cadbury’s was a coveted position in the area, a cause for celebration. It meant good, steady work in a clean atmosphere with holidays, education, medical and dental treatment and all sorts of sports and clubs available to the staff. For Edie, getting her place there was like the great miracle of her life. It was the one and only time she could ever remember her mother being obviously pleased with her. ‘Of course our Edie’s going to work at
Cadbury’s
,’ she boasted snootily to the neighbours. And Ruby got a place as well. Their lives had revolved round the works for the past five years: scrubbing round their work station every Friday, one Saturday off in four, the trips and picnics.

Next door to the Bonners lived a Mr Vintner, who’d been wounded and shellshocked in the war. He was sitting in the doorway of his house, staring at the street with his vacant, childlike eyes. With his one arm he liked to offer sweets to anyone who went by. As kids they’d been warned off (‘Don’t go taking sweets from that Mr Vintner’), but now Edie thought, poor soul, and went and accepted a humbug from the little white bag he held out.

‘Thanks, Mr Vintner,’ she said. ‘You keeping all right?’ He nodded at her solemnly.

Smudge, the Bonners’ mongrel, was panting in a patch of shade in the yard, and the back door was flung open. The smell that came out was a rank mixture of damp, stale cooking, a hint of booze. Ethel had always liked a tot of the hard stuff. These days it was more than a tot. Edie dreaded going there now. Every day when she was younger, she’d run round there as soon as she could. There was always something going on at the Bonners’ house – the five boys up to all sorts: football, marbles, roaring up and down the street on home-made go-karts. Sid and Ethel had worked in the theatre, in variety, before they married. He was a pianist and she sang and danced. Ethel gave it up when the kids came along, while Sid earned regular money playing irregular hours for pubs, tea dances, ballet schools, and, like his father, by tuning pianos. Often, when Edie arrived at the house, she heard music floating out, jolly popular songs and dance tunes, and Ethel singing along,
No, No, Nanette
or songs from
Hit the Deck
in her strong, gravelly voice. Not now though. Edie tapped on the door and heard Ethel shout, ‘Who is it?’

‘It’s only me – Edie!’ She feared that Mrs Bonner might ask her in and sit staring at her with her sad, bloodshot eyes, hair streaky grey now the bleach had grown out.

Ruby’s six-year-old brother, the youngest of the family, appeared in a filthy, torn vest and a pair of shorts which reached half-way down to his ankles.

‘Awright Edie,’ he grinned.

‘Can’t stop, Alfie,’ she said quickly, putting the bag on the floor just inside the door. ‘Just dropping off Ruby’s swimming things. She’s gone into town to get you all some tea. She’ll be home soon.’

Edie walked sadly up the road, dodging the kids who were playing out. It felt terrible slinking away from the Bonners as fast as she could. Not long ago she’d have done anything to be round there where it felt safe and everyone was kind! Everything she did this week hammered home the message that her life was changing and how much she was about to lose. In marrying Jack, she’d gain a home and independence of a sort, but . . . Their swim today had been what set her off this afternoon. Memories kept flooding back.

She and Ruby had been together through the Cad-bury’s Continuation School until they were eighteen. One day of the working week they spent in the school on Bournville Green, extending an education that would otherwise have ended when they were fourteen. As well as subjects like arithmetic and history, they’d put on plays, been taken on outings – trips along the Cut, camping at Holyhead – and got plenty of physical exercise. It was because of Cadbury’s that Edie had learned to swim. Tuesday lunchtime was Ladies’ Day at the Bournville baths. There was time to swim, luxuriate in the showers which lined the gallery above the pool, and then eat a bit of dinner. Today they’d eaten their buttered cobs out in the sun. Ruby was the one who’d taught her to swim. Cadbury’s had an instructor, to teach their employees. The initiate would go into the water with a rope round their middle and she held the other end and shouted instructions, hauling them along the pool. Ruby was one of those people who just took to it like a fish, but the instructor, Miss Proctor, scared the wits out of Edie.