Gull Island (10 page)

Once they came face to face, him in his going-out suit and white shiny collar and neat tie, her in ill-fitting clothes badly in need of a wash and strangers to an iron. She paused, wondering if he dared to look at her. The pavement was crowded with early shoppers and they were so close she could see the bristles on the point of his chin where the razor had missed. Rather than pass her he changed direction, head down, and hurried away.

‘You pig!’ she shouted in tearful rage. The small satisfaction of seeing his face and neck redden with embarrassment helped a little.

Mrs Carey had reacted badly to the trauma of losing her home. With it went the washing and ironing she did for neighbours. It was impossible for her to carry washing to the house on the beach, even if she had the
facilities
there to deal with the work. And there were no extra children to mind as she was too far away from those she had previously helped. The loss of the few shillings she had earned was devastating. There were so many basic things she needed.

She was still weak from the birth of Meriel and felt she was losing the
battle to cope. There was nothing else for it, she decided, one cold, wet morning – she would have to use the money Barbara’s mother had given her over the months since Barbara had been thrown out of her home. It had been given, after all, to help as she saw fit.

Amid the jumble of clothes and saucepans and general clutter, she unearthed a tin box. It had a picture of King George V and Queen Mary on the front and it had once contained tea. She opened it, surprised at how light it seemed, and found nothing more than the paper in which she had wrapped the precious coins. Someone had taken them.

When Richard and Mr Carey came home that evening, they were bubbling with excitement.

‘Wait till tomorrow, Mam,’ Richard said, but he refused to be drawn on the reason for the secret smiles he and his father shared.

‘Tell me,’ Barbara pleaded. ‘I won’t say a word. Got a better job, has he, your father?’

‘No, but we’ve decided this will be our proper home. We’re not moving on. We’re staying here and making it comfortable, just like a real home.’

The following day, Barbara was told at two of the places where she worked that she was no longer required. The baby, who still cried all day and half the night, was the reason she was given. One of them was The Anchor, where her father drank with his friends, and she wondered bitterly if he had persuaded the landlady to ask her to leave.

She wandered around the shops and the large private houses where there were still likely to be servants or paid help. Door after door opened and quickly closed. There was nothing for her unless she left the baby with someone.

Learning of the situation, Mrs Stock offered a solution. ‘Leave the baby with me. I’ll look after her while you work. You might get a more respectable job of work then, instead of clearing up filth after heaven knows who!’

The cold voice seemed more a threat than an answer to Barbara’s
problems
and she shook her head and turned away. Bernard’s mother was not the company she wanted for her beautiful, if noisy, daughter.

‘Leave her with me tomorrow and you’ll have a better chance of finding somewhere,’ Mrs Carey offered, when Barbara went back to the beach house and told her what had happened.

‘I can’t, Auntie Molly Carey, you aren’t well.’

‘Better I am, and with nowhere to go, no washing and ironing to do, no neighbours wanting me to mind their children, I’m well placed for an extra one.’ She spoke with enthusiasm, guilt at losing Barbara’s money making her desperate to help.

The sky was losing its brightness, everything around them fading into a quivering, floating blur so distances were confusing. Gull Island was nothing more than an indistinct outline that might or might not be real. Trees had lost their freshly sprouted greenness and became as grey as the rocks around the house. Rain began to fall, darkening the evening ever further when Mr Carey and a jubilant Richard returned home.

They arrived on a horse-drawn cart borrowed, they told her, from the fruit and vegetable man. On the cart were lengths of wood to repair the room above the porch, together with bags of cement and some sand and a bag of assorted nails and screws, plus a few necessary tools.

On top of the sacks Mrs Carey gasped to see a table, a rocking chair, a square of red and yellow matting and, last of all, an iron fireplace with a hob on either side on which to stand saucepans. Walking along in their wake was an elderly horse carrying an even more elderly man who wore a bucket hat and several layers of coats.

While the children stroked and admired the horses, the old man, helped by Richard with Mr Carey watching with interest, fixed the fireplace. He warned them not to use it for a few days, then, attaching his mount to the back of the cart, he left them having said fewer than a dozen words and an equal number of grunts.

‘But where did it come from?’ a delighted Mrs Carey asked. Her eyes were shining as she touched and admired her treasures. ‘Where did the money come from?’

‘Let’s say the people who took our home from us helped us get started.’ Mr Carey grinned at his son. ‘Tell her, boy, tell what you found.’

‘It was when we were moving, Mam. They were throwing our stuff out on the road and taking their own stuff in and I found a box with money in it. I knew it couldn’t be ours. I thought they owed us that, chucking us out like that, so I took it. Look at all this! We’re rich!’

Mrs Carey turned away in shock. The money didn’t belong to the new tenants. It was the money she had been given to save for Barbara.

‘Aren’t you pleased, our Mam?’ Richard asked.

‘Pleased? Of course I’m pleased.’

‘Stealing, mind, isn’t it, Mam, and we know that’s wicked,’ Idris said, his face angelic. ‘Richard is wicked. He stole the money and that’s wicked, isn’t it, Mam?’

‘Say wicked just once more and I’ll thump you!’ Richard growled.

Mrs Carey glanced at Barbara in sorrow. ‘But there we are. In this world it’s a question of who needs it most, isn’t it?’

‘That’s what our dad said,’ Richard agreed stoutly, glaring at his brother.

One day I’ll tell her, Mrs Carey vowed. One day I’ll explain how I tried
to save the money but with the eviction it just wasn’t possible. I will tell her, though, so she knows her mam and I did try.

When the new possessions were carried into the house, Idris tried to persuade his father to go with him to see a castle he had built, but Mr Carey sank into the newly acquired rocking chair and ignored Idris as he usually did. He communicated little with his children, except Richard, who was his hard-working partner.

On the following Friday, Barbara found a job, of sorts – a few hours cleaning in a public house, with the promise that one day she might be offered work in the bar. But the landlord firmly refused to allow her to take Rosita. She didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t ask the kind Mrs Carey to look after her indefinitely, not while she was so unwell.

Determinedly she began knocking on doors to ask if there was anyone who would look after Rosita for a few hours each day. The woman she found was already looking after three others but the house looked clean and tidy so Barbara agreed to bring Rosita to her the following morning.

For a while it worked well, Rosita seemed happy to go in when they reached the woman’s door each day and always came out smiling. Then, a couple of weeks later, she went to collect her little girl and the woman smiled and said, ‘She’s with her gran. Called she did and took her to buy her a little present.’

‘What? D’you mean my mother has taken her?’ A bubble of painful joy burst in Barbara’s heart. At last Mam was willing to accept her
granddaughter
. She pressed her hands to her chest. She hadn’t realized just how much she had wanted this.

‘Thanks. I’ll go now and fetch her.’

Filled with excitement, she ran to the door of the house she hadn’t seen for months and knocked on the door. When her mother answered it there was such excitement that she couldn’t get any words out. ‘Mam?’ she said in a whisper.

The happiness was immediately wiped away as her father’s voice boomed, ‘Send her away. She doesn’t belong here.’

‘Rosita, Mam, I’ve called for Rosita.’

‘She isn’t here. Why should she be here?’

‘Clear off!’ her father shouted, hovering out of sight behind the door. ‘You and that bastard of yours.’ Barbara didn’t hear the hurtful words; she was filled with anxiety for Rosita.

‘But the woman who looks after her said – Oh my God, please help me. It’s Mrs Stock. Mam, Mrs Stock has taken Rosita! Help me, please, she’s taken my baby!’ Her father’s hand came and pulled her mother inside. As
the door slammed, Barbara got a brief glimpse of her mother’s stricken face as her father shouted at her.

She banged on the door, shouting, screaming, begging for help. Someone had to help her; she needed someone to go with her and make sure Rosita was returned to her. But the door remained firmly closed although she knocked and screamed until she lost all sensation in her knuckles.

Still sobbing wildly, she ran to the house where Mrs Stock lived. Banging on that door produced as little result. The curtains were drawn and the house was locked and appeared to be empty.

She arrived at the Careys’ still crying and unable at first to explain what had happened. Miraculously Luke appeared and calmed her and soon had all the facts.

‘Don’t worry, she’s sure to be safe and that’s the main thing. Rosita will be safe. We’ll soon get her back. No one will take her from you.’

Dressed in his office clothes and with Barbara washed, neatly dressed and calm, they went to the police station and made their complaint. Hours went slowly past as the policeman, seemingly unhurried and lacking a sense of urgency, set about making enquiries. Barbara grew increasingly distraught. Luke sent a message to his assistant Jean that he wouldn’t be in the next day and stayed with her, sleeping under his boat and spending the daylight hours with Barbara.

For minutes at a time Barbara screamed her hatred of Mrs Stock, who had cruelly refused to help when she was needed, denied her beautiful granddaughter and was now causing her this agony. She called her all the wicked names she could bring to mind. Luke didn’t try to stop her – best she vented her anger on someone and at least Mrs Stock was so far unaware of it.

‘I want to hurt her,’ Barbara sobbed. ‘I want to hurt her and see her screaming like I am, and suffer some of my pain!’

‘She lost all her sons, remember,’ Mrs Carey said softly.

‘That only makes it worse, her knowing how I must feel!’

Barbara and Luke wandered the streets together, unable to rest, and when Luke was talking to the police and trying to find a crumb of comfort to report, she wandered alone. She frequently ran up to look at a baby, imagining she would see the face of her own child. As the day and night dragged by, she would collapse exhausted into a corner of the sea wall, or under a hedge or on the stony beach and doze, only to wake moments later with panic renewed and intensified.

She couldn’t go into the house; she felt closer to Rosita if she were outside, as if the baby might be calling her and she would not hear through walls and curtained doorways. Sleep was brief and restless and she would
start frequently into wide-awake panic, convinced by some quickly forgotten dream that her baby was dead. Luke was always there to soothe her.

Luke tried to encourage her to talk, to make plans for when Rosita came home, but her mood shifted between uncontrollable sobbing and sitting unmoving as though in a trance, listening for Rosita’s cries. Her lovely face was drawn and had lost its glow; her blue eyes seemed larger and full of melancholy.

Richard’s contribution was, ‘Come back she will, for sure. No one could put up with her yelling for long and that’s a fact!’

After two nights had passed without a word, Barbara found herself thinking of all the brown envelopes that had been delivered around the streets of the town. All the grieving they had caused. She began to think of Mrs Stock in a slightly different way and imagined the poor woman nursing her son’s child and caring for her with love. All those deaths meant more to her now. Without her baby for three days she was almost out of her mind. How could Mrs Stock have survived after losing her sons for ever? The slight sympathy eased her mind a little.

‘At least,’ she told Luke, ‘I know she wouldn’t harm her. She’s had enough of death.’

It took three days for the police to find them. The trail began at the railway station, where they had been seen buying tickets, then, after exhaustive enquiries, they learnt from friends that Mrs Stock had an aunt living in Newport.

On the morning of the third day Luke woke and couldn’t find Barbara. He searched with increasing concern and after waking Henry and Molly Carey and Richard to help, they found her huddled, shivering and crying outside Luke’s cottage, now locked and padlocked. Luke snapped the padlock on the door and took her inside. He lit the fire and made her sip some quickly heated soup and then held her until she slept.

She awoke to see a policeman smiling down at her.

‘Your baby has been found safe and sound, miss. And if her yelling’s got anything to do with it, she’s in excellent health!’ The policeman’s
expression
was so full of joy at the happy outcome to the worrying search, she hugged him.

Barbara and Luke travelled with the police to Newport to collect Rosita. The little girl was crying as usual, a sound Barbara would never complain of again.

‘How can I ever thank you, Luke?’ Barbara sobbed as she held the
fidgeting
, grizzling child close once they were back home.

‘I didn’t do anything. It was the police who found her, and quickly too.’

‘But you were there. I – I don’t know what I’d have done if you’d gone away. I’ve never needed anyone more than I’ve needed you these past three terrible days.’

They were sitting on the doorstep of the cottage belonging to Luke’s father. Luke took Rosita from her and held her, and she went straight to sleep. She always settled better when he held her. Barbara leaned her head towards him, resting against him in a slumped contentment, her face close to his. Uneasily, Luke moved away and stood, looking out across the water to Gull Island.