Coronation Wives (37 page)

‘Got a job yet?’ Muriel asked, a sneer painted more heavily on her mouth than her lipstick.

‘None of your business.’

‘Oow. Sorry I spoke! Not going to be easy though, is it, what with your ol’ man in clink. You’ll miss the money. Have to make do and mend and buy all the scrag ends of mutton to make a pie fer Sunday.’

Polly reared up, her finger stabbing close to Muriel’s nose. ‘Cheap meat I’ll buy at the butcher’s, but I don’t want to stay ’ere and end up as “cheap meat” for ’im in there! But then, you always was more scrag end than prime steak, wasn’t you, Muriel?’

‘Well!’ Muriel looked fit to burst. Her plastic earrings rattled, reminding Polly of milk bottle tops strung on string and laid out over seedbeds to keep the birds away.

Polly snatched her money and her cards and walked out, her head high, glad that she’d put on her best black and white checked suit for the occasion.

Billy had been sentenced at the magistrates’ court and transferred to Horfield Prison. Although it wasn’t that great a distance, Polly had to fit visiting in with making a living and the dictates of the prison authorities. She’d made up her mind to go there straight after collecting her cards.

Smokes were on ration in prison and weren’t too easy to get hold of outside given the price they were now — one shilling and sixpence for ten Woodbines. But Betty Knight, a neighbour, worked in W.D. & H.O. Wills where they made the things so she got free issue. It was just a question of passing them to Billy.

On the last occasion she’d visited there’d been a grille between her and him. He’d looked down in the mouth since he’d just gone down for nine months. Strange how little things become important, she thought, as she got the bus that would take her up Gloucester Road to the prison. A guard named Jock McGregor had told her that the visiting facilities were being altered, ‘To make more room for the amount of crooks we’ve got in this city. Must be an army of lonely women out there without their men.’ He’d looked at her suggestively. ‘I don’t mind keeping a lady company if she’s got a need for a man in her life.’

For a moment Polly had had half a mind to blow a bubble with the pink gum she had been chewing right into his stupid face. But what he’d said next had changed her mind.

‘You’ll be just across a table from him next time. It’s a temporary measure. And I’ll be watching you,’ he added. ‘Never fear! I’ll be watching you.’

She remembered that fact now. ‘I need the lav first,’ she said and grinned up at him. ‘Must be all the excitement.’

‘Don’t think you can get too friendly across them tables,’ repeated Jock. ‘Remember I’ll be watching you.’

‘With a bit of luck you won’t be watching close enough,’ Polly murmured to herself once she was behind the thickly varnished wood of a lavatory door. Taking care not to squash it flat she slid the packet of cigarettes beneath her stocking suspender.

She’d told Meg what she intended doing before she’d left that morning.

‘What if you get caught?’ said Meg.

‘I’ll get a telling off and be banned for a while.’ She smirked at Meg’s worried face and added, ‘Don’t worry. I won’t end up in there with ’im sharing ’is bunk.’ She paused once she realized what she’d said and smiled cheekily. ‘Though I could definitely do with it.’

Meg tutted, but not very seriously.

Polly was glad she took the cigarettes. Billy’s appearance was not good. He looked thinner, there were dark hollows beneath his eyes and his skin was almost as grey as the prison issue clothes he was wearing. He coughed as he sat down opposite her. A guard reminded them that they were not allowed to touch. They didn’t – not above the table. Beneath it Polly passed the packet of cigarettes to Billy.

‘It’s still warm,’ he whispered.

‘Came from a warm place.’ She winked, then frowned as a series of coughs caused him to bend over the table. ‘Billy! Are you OK?’

He nodded, but still coughed, his face as red as a turkey cock’s gizzard.

Without her asking, a prison guard brought over a glass of water. ‘Wanna stop that smoking,’ the guard said. ‘It ain’t no good for you.’

‘Thanks,’ Billy croaked as he took the glass.

Polly put both hands on the table and leaned forward. A frown crumpled the bright expression she’d adopted especially for the visit. What with Susan and David, there was enough illness about without him getting sick too.

‘Billy?’

His shoulders shuddered with each cough. He’d never had good lungs, but had continued to smoke, continued to rush around chasing the next easy fiver. None of it could be doing him any good.

Once the coughing subsided he managed to smile. ‘That guard’s probably right. I should give up the fags, not these though, not now I know where they come from.’

He brightened and lit up a cigarette and Polly brightened too.

‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘Just you wait till we get you out of
here. Soon feed you up and get you fit again. And then, once yer on yer feet again we can be off to Australia. That sunshine over there’ll do you the world of good.’

Billy looked at her pensively from behind a plume of swirling smoke. ‘We can’t go there. Not now.’ He looked away, seemingly preferring to look at the dull walls, the hatchet-faced warders or the smoke curling up from a dozen other lit fags – anywhere rather than at her.

Polly’s smile froze, but didn’t disappear entirely. Her expression and her voice were resolute. ‘We made the decision, Billy, and we’re sticking to it. There’s no going back.’

Billy looked down at the smouldering cigarette that he held between his yellow-stained fingers. She could see his mouth twitching as he sought to get the words out. From experience she knew he was about to say something she didn’t want to hear.

‘We can’t go, Polly, or at least I can’t. I was talking about it to some bloke in ’ere. If you’ve got a prison record they don’t let you in.’

Polly’s mouth dropped like a slate from the roof. This couldn’t be true – could it? Suddenly she felt like a stupid brainless hen she’d read about in one of her daughter’s storybooks. Only in her case it was for real. The world had fallen on her head.

She was still numb on the bus going home and stared out of the rain-spattered windows, hardly registering the Victorian villas, the shops lining each side of Gloucester Road. Even when the bus got to the Horsefair, so named because of a fair held in medieval times, she did not really see the white concrete facades of Jones’s and Lewis’s, two huge department stores that had risen on the ashes of the Blitz. She did recall tales of bodies being found there when they were building; plague victims, they said, from hundreds of years ago.

Thoughts of past deaths and her prison visit combined to make her feel bad. Billy didn’t look well. Prison was not good for him, but she couldn’t help feeling resentful. If he hadn’t got into trouble with the law they’d be off to Australia now for the princely sum of ten pounds each. By breaking the law he had sentenced them to a life in this country and this one alone.

With hindsight she wished she had given in to Griffiths, not because she wanted to, but purely out of revenge on Billy.
He wouldn’t know.
But I would, she thought, with a bitter sense of satisfaction. I would.

She got off the bus at the Centre and went to the bus stop that would take her back up to Camborne Crescent. Waiting gave her plenty of time to think about things, mostly about getting another job. It wouldn’t be easy. In fact, she thought to herself, having a husband in prison would make it bloody damn difficult!

Lazily, she eyed the traffic going by, uncaring of the spray thrown up by their wheels. What a variety! Buses, bikes, even the odd horse-drawn dray, just like the ones that used to pull up over the Batch from the brewery when they’d lived in York Street down in the Dings.

‘Happy days,’ she muttered darkly and scowled.

If only she had married a bloke like one of these driving these cars. She eyed the driver of each vehicle as it went by, smiling at some, winking at others.

‘Toffee-nosed git,’ she muttered at those that looked away. She was alone on the bus stop. Couldn’t one of them stop and give her a lift?

Just as the thought finished crossing her mind, a car pulled into the kerb. She stooped down in order to see the driver better and judge whether to be cheeky or charming as the case might be. Instead she came face to face with Edna, who offered to give her a lift home.

‘Bit out of your way, innit?’

‘I want to ask you something.’

Polly settled herself on the navy blue leather upholstery. ‘Been somewhere nice?’

Edna shook her head and kept her eyes fixed on the road. ‘I’ve been to my mother’s. I was on my way home, then I saw you.’

Polly frowned. ‘Oh yeah,’ she said apprehensively, and prayed that Edna wasn’t going to prattle on about Susan. In fact, she’d prefer it if she didn’t mention it at all. Sickness frightened her, though she didn’t dare admit it. And was it catching? Could Edna have caught it from Susan, and could she get it from Edna and then, heaven forbid, pass it on to Carol? The permutations were terrifying, but Polly composed herself and asked how things were.

‘I hear you’re out of work,’ stated Edna.

Straight to the point, thought Polly. Well, that’s refreshing I must say.

‘Yep! Out on the streets – or I will be if I don’t get a job pretty sharpish.’

‘My father needs some help with my mother – a bit of general care rather than nursing. Would you be interested?’

Polly hesitated. Looking after Edna’s mother? Could she do that?

‘I ain’t got no medical training at all, though I did work for David of course, but not kind of …’ She swallowed hard. Edna had seen her with David once. It had almost been the death of her – or at least the death of her friendship with Charlotte. ‘Why not!’ she said suddenly. ‘I could do with the money.’

They had passed through Queens Square and were pulling up over Redcliffe Hill when Edna said, ‘That wasn’t all I wanted to ask you. I’m going to demand to see Susan. But I don’t want to go alone. Will you come with me?’

Sickness and hospitals were places Polly had avoided all her life and didn’t particularly want to have anything to do with now.

‘You’re braver than me,’ Edna added suddenly.

From then on it was a matter of self-esteem. Polly had always cultivated the hard-baked exterior of the good-hearted, good-time girl. Edna was calling her bluff and Polly found herself unable to refuse.

‘I’ll go with you. We’ll show ’em they can’t keep a mother from ’er kid!’

When they finally got to Camborne Crescent, Edna got out of the car, her eyes brimming with tears. She walked with Polly to the garden gate, hugged her and poured a profusion of thanks in her ear.

‘Don’t mention it,’ Polly said, blushing with pleasure. For once in her life she felt like a saint.

Janet heard about Edna’s behaviour from her mother and felt instantly guilty. She promised to visit Susan as much as she could. ‘I owe it to all of them,’ she said.

Charlotte did not try and dissuade her. ‘Just be careful,’ she warned and Janet promised her she would be. ‘I like this job,’ she added. ‘I feel I’m really involved in something useful.’

Between eight and nine o’clock, Saltmead Sanatorium fell into a quiet period between the day and nightshifts. Patients had been fed and food trollies returned to the kitchens. Daytime nurses were tying up the loose ends, tidying desks and medicine cupboards before the night nurses came on duty so there would be no cause for complaint. Time was also taken up with gossip as well as patient progress.

Janet timed things carefully. Through trial and error, she knew whom she was likely to see where and at which time.

Tiny Tim had been abandoned in favour of Ali Baba and his magic carpet.
One Hundred and One Arabian Nights
had never been one of Janet’s favourites – and it showed. The stories got muddled, not helped by her fear of being caught.

Susan looked forward to her visits, recognizing her storyteller by the large glasses and an outfit too voluminous for her slim figure.

‘I like you best,’ she said at the end of yet another muddled
story where a fictional bird had somehow changed into a magic carpet.

‘Because you like my stories?’ Janet asked her.

Susan shook her head. ‘No. Because you don’t put hot things on my leg.’

‘Hot things? What hot things?’

Between tears, Susan tried to explain. The child was clearly upset and left Janet questioning whether she’d heard things right. The following morning she asked Jonathan about it, though she couched it in such terms that Susan wasn’t mentioned.

Although their relationship had cooled on the personal front, their professional interaction had not altered. Obsessed with his work and perhaps with a need to prove himself, he went out of his way to explain things to her.

‘Hot cloths are applied to the limbs affected by the disease. Current medical thinking is that heat generates cellular regeneration, in other words, gets the nervous system working again.’

On Thursday evening she went to see Susan again and dared to lift the sheet that covered her leg. Susan began to snivel.

‘No more!’ Her voice wavered.

Janet felt as though her jaw would break as she surveyed the large pieces of lint covering Susan’s right leg. Letting the sheet down gently, she made a huge effort to compose herself.

‘What story shall we have tonight?’

‘Peter Pan. The bit where he flies away with Wendy.’

Telling the story was harder than it had ever been; that thin little leg encased in white lint was not easily forgotten.

Once outside the ward, she pulled the protective hat from her head and tugged the rough cloth of her garment away from her neck. Still wearing the glassless spectacles, she leaned her head against the wall and took a deep breath. It was dangerous
to linger half-disguised. If someone saw her, questions would be asked. But it couldn’t be helped. Seeing Susan suffer was just too upsetting – and she was the only one seeing this. Not Edna, not Colin, not anyone.

A warning voice inside told her to pull herself together, get her disguise off and get out of here before her secret was discovered. Susan’s welfare was all that counted.