Hannah massey (8 page)

Rosie turned from her mother's waiting glance and looked towards the fire. A heat came surging up through her body and showed in moisture on her upper lip. She dabbed it with her mother's handkerchief and said, "Aw, well." Then went on, "There's no much to tell, not really.

Well, you see, I had words with a girl in the office. It. it was

about promotion, but she had been there longer than me. And anyway things got unpleasant and I gave me notice in. "

"When? When was this? You never said a word in your letters."

"Oh ... oh about three months ago. I--I didn't ask for a reference; because I had had words I didn't like to go back, sort of climb down, you know. And it's difficult to get set on anywhere, at least in a good job, if you haven't a reference. "

"Was that why you haven't written tor weeks? I was worried sick at times. An' getting' your da to write is as hard as getting him up in the morning .. Was that why you moved to the new address?"

"Yes... yes, Ma." Rosie was looking into the fire as she spoke.

"I

couldn't keep up the rent of the flat and so I went into rooms . with a girl I knew. We . we shared everything; she was to pay the

landlady. Then about three weeks ago she went off without a word and I found she owed a lot of back rent and the landlady said I was

responsible for it. Well. well I had the 'flu as I told you and I ran out of money altogether, all I had saved, and the landlady said she was entitled to keep my things until I could pay. And so"--Rosie turned towards her mother but didn't look at her" --there . there was nothing for it but to come home. "

"Aw, lass." Hannah was gripping her hands now.

"The heartless bitch of a woman, she should be spiflicated. All your beautiful clothes and your cases. Your fine dressing-case an' all, witK all the bottles and things in, she's kept the lot?" Her voice seemed to be pushing up her arched eyebrows and raising her thick grew hair from her scalp.

"Yes. Yes, Ma."

"Well, the morrow morning you'll send what you owe her and she'll send those things on or else me name's not Hannah

Massey. "

"No, no, Ma; I don't think I'll do that. I'd rather buy new clothes and cases than write to her. I ... I don't want anything more to do with her, or London. I just want to forget everything. I... I'll get a job and soon stock up again."

"Well, I for one wouldn't let her get off with" ---- "Oh, Ma, just leave it,... Please. I'm tired of it all, London and everything."

"Aw, all right, all right, lass, have it your own way. As long as you're home that's all that matters to me. But I'll say I wish her luck with your things; I hope she falls down an' breaks her blasted neck, I do so. What will she do with them, do you think?" She peered at Rosie through narrowed lids.

"Oh ... oh, I think.... Well, she's my build, perhaps she'll wear them.

It... it doesn't matter."

"No, no, it doesn't matter." Hannah was shaking Rosie's hands firmly between her own, each movement being accompanied by a word.

"But listen to me. Don't let on about a thing you've told me to any of them. Do you hear me? An' tomorrow we'll work something' out. You

said your stuff was coming on. Well, it'll have to come on. We'll go into Newcastle and get you rigged out, two or three rig-outs for that matter." She winked.

"An' some cases, one exactly like the other I bought you. And when we get off the train we'll put them in a station taxi and say we've

collected them on our way. How's that for strategy?"

Rosie smiled faintly.

"It's marvelous, Ma," "Oh, I'm a good liar."

As Hannah shook her head proudly at herself, Rosie thought sadly, But not such a good one as your daughter.

Rosie was sound asleep when her mother brought her breakfast up to her room.

"That's the ticket," Hannah said.

"The rest will do you the world of good."

"Oh, what time is it, Ma?" asked Rosie.

"Well, turned nine. You've slept the clock round, me girl."

Rosie hadn't slept the clock round. It had been five in the morning when she had finally fallen into troubled sleep.

Hannah sat with her,_ demanding that she ate every scrap of food on the tray, and before she rose to take the tray away she a-HM

nudged her, saying, conspiratorially, "Don't forget we're goin' out this afternoon, hail, snow or blow."

"I'll pay you back, Ma."

"Who's talkin' of payin" back? Aw, lass, I get paid back with interest every time I look at you. " She lifted the rumpled mass of gleaming hair between her fingers and felt it.

"Like spun bronze, it is," she said.

"I've never seen the like."

The shiver went through Rosie's body again. Such admiration was

fear-filling, terrifying.

"Look," said Hannah now, excitedly.

"Get into your things an' come down to me room when we've got the house empty, for it won't be that for long, an' I'll show you something'."

She paused; then bending over the tray and bringing her face down to Rosie, she said, "Your mother's no fool."

As Rosie looked up silently into her face, Hannah winked broadly. Then walking sideways towards the door, the tray balanced on one hand, she said, "Come on down with you now, and look slick. Get into

anythin'."

She paused, then added, "Put on your new suit; the other things are not you, not you at all, at all."

Slowly Rosie got from the bed and put on the new suit. All her

movements were slow and laboured. She felt very tired, not only from the lack of sleep but from the reaction of the whole of yesterday. She went down the stairs, and as she was going into the bathroom her mother opened the bedroom door and called, "Let that wait a minute" come on in here. " And when she entered the room Hannah locked the door behind her, and pointing to the bed, said, " Sit yourself down there. "

Then she went to a short chest of three drawers that stood in a

recess.

The chest did not match the modem suite. The edges-of the drawers were all scarred, and the bottom and deepest drawer and the bulbous legs showed the imprint of hard toe caps It was not a chest at all but an original Charles the Second walnut desk with flat top which Hannah had picked up forty years ago for two pounds ten. The sum then was a small fortune and she thought she had been done; she was unaware of its

present-day value, but the chest held something even more valuable than itself. After pushing her hand down inside her jumper she brought out a small key and, unlocking the bottom drawer, she lifted it right out of its socket and carried it to the. bed. Dropping it down next to Rosie she sat at the other side of it and pointed at its contents.

Rosie's wide lids hid her expression as she looked along the lines of neatly rolled bundles of notes. Line after line of them, some two

deep, covering the bottom of the drawer. Then her lips calling apart, she lifted her eyes to her mother, and Hannah, whose every feature was expressing triumph, said softly, "Can you believe your eyes?"

"But, Ma, where.... Whose is it? " "Whose is it!" Hannah pulled her chin inwards, making a treble row of flesh down her neck.

"Whose is it, do you ask? Why, it's mine of course. An' don't look like that, lass; I haven't stolen it. Oh, be god She put her hand up to her cheek.

"Did you think ... did you think I'd pinched the stuff? Now, where would I be findin' a place to pinch pound notes except in a bank? An'

I wouldn't be up to that." She laughed.

"An* I can assure you, not one of me children have soiled their hands at thievin' either."

There flashed across Rosie's mind the picture of them emptying the shed last night and what lay beneath where they sat at this moment, but she let the picture slide away.

"How much do you think is there?" Hannah dug her index finger downwards.

"I haven't any idea."

"Go on, give a guess."

Rosie didn't answer, "I really don't know--tell me," because she knew her mother wouldn't know either, at least not exactly, for this woman could count up to ten and then add three to it because she'd had

thirteen children. At a stretch she could put ten and ten together and make it twenty, because there were twenty shillings in a pound note, but that was as far, Rosie knew, as her mother could go, because her mother could neither read nor write. But this lack was never referred to in the house. It was like a disfigurement that was ignored, but more out of fear than pity, for her mother would have sla'n anyone who made reference to her deficiency. Hannah could discuss the news of the day as if she had read the paper from end to end, when all she had done was listen to the wireless. The wireless was not only her tutor, it was her face-saver.

Rosie picked up a roll of notes and, taking off the wire band, she counted twenty pounds.

"Are they all the same?" she asked quietly.

"They are all the same," answered Hannah just as quietly.

Rapidly Rosie began to count. She lifted one layer after another, and after some time she looked up at her mother and said in a whisper,

"Roughly about two thousand eight hundred, I should say."

"Two thousand eight hundred!" Hannah repeated.

"Well now, what do you think of that?"

"But, Ma, how have you done it?"

"Management, lass, management. I'm no fool you know, as I said."

Rosie looked in amazement at the big smiling woman sitting at the other side of the drawer as she went on, "Well now, for the last five years they've hardly lost a day, except Shane in the winter on the buildings, and big money they've been makin'. Jimmy could take forty pounds a week at times in the bad weather, making the bridge. Hell' the work was, up to his eyes in water, but the money made up for it.

And Arthur still makes a steady twenty-five when he's leading from the quarries. Shane's never made much, never more than eighteen, but Barny could make his twenty with overtime. Your da. well, it's been twenty sometimes, but mostly sixteen. Then there's Karen and the other one, but Karen's two pounds a week hardly keeps her in the fancy puddings she likes. As for the other"-she didn't ay Hughie, " four pounds is all I've ever got off him, never . more. "

At the bitter note in her mother's voice, Rosie felt compelled to say,

"Well, I don't suppose he makes much more than that omc weeks.

There's nothing much in the cobbling, is there? "

"There's plenty in the cobbling if he would go out an' look for it--people still have their boots mended--but no, sittin' in the back shop rca ding that's how he spends his time. His room upstairs is full of nothing else but books.... That's where his money goes, second-hand book shops. An' what good have they done him I ask you, for he's

nothing but a scug? Aw" --she thook her head violently"--don't let's talk about him.... Now, as I was sayin', about the money here." She drew her fingers gently over the rolls.

"You wanted to know how I've managed it. Well, when they all got steadily going I said to them, we'll divide it into three, I said, each of your pay packets into three. One part will be for your own pocket, another part will be for your board and your workin' clothes, and boots et cetera, and with the other part I'll buy your best suits and things and put a bit by for a rainy day. An* all said O.K." Ma, it was all right by them. All except Arthur. He wasn't so keen, tar even then lie had his eye on that piece. But I put me foot down. You'll be like the others or not at all, I said. An' there's Jimmy. There's hardly a week goes by even now when he hasn't tea pounds on a Friday night in his pocket, but never a penny he has by the Monday m'ornin. If he had twenty it would be the game with him, the big softy. I said to him he should look out for a rainy day. And you know what he said? " She leant acroa the drawer towards Rosie.

"I'll leave you to cope with the weather, Ma. That's what he said."

"Do they know about this?" Rosie pointed to the money.

"Begod! No. Not even Broderick knows the amount I've got;

nor is he going to. That's me drawer, Broderick, I've said, an it's the only personal thing I have in this house. I look to you to honour it. An' don't go searchin' for the key. An' I know he never has, an'

it's been locked all this many a year. When it only held a few

shillings it was locked. "

"But, Ma." Rosie shook her head slowly.

"What if someone was to break in, if someone got to know?"

"Who's to know? How could anyone outside know when those inside don't?

Oh, they chip me about me stockin' leg, an' they know I've got a few pounds put by because they know who f come to when they're up against it; an' they've only got to say they want a suit and it's on their back. But I don't forget to tell them how much I spend on them; I rub it in"--she bounced her head" --so's they won't think I'm makin' a pile out of them. "

Rosie lowered her head. You had to laugh at her ma, you had to laugh or go for her and say, "Well, that's what you're doing, isn't it, Ma, making a pile out of them?" But no one could say that to her ma; her ma was a law unto herself, her ma had her own type of reasoning.

"Begod, listen!" Hannah, had jumped up from the bed, her hand held aloft.

"Here they are already, Betty and the hairns."

As the shouts of-"Gran! Gran!" came from down below, Hannah whipped up the drawer and, shuffling with it to the chest, put it back into place again and locked it. Then pulling the front of her jumper wide, she inserted her hand in, saying the while to Rosie, "I have a bag pinned on me vest." She patted her breast.

"There's no one going to go rummagin' in there." She laughed as she pushed Rosie in front of her on to the landing.

The three children were grouped around the foot of the stairs looking upwards with eager faces, and Hannah cried at them, "Hello! Catherine, me hairn. And you, Theresa. Aw, an' there's me big man." She came down the last stairs with hands extended as if in benediction and laid them on the four-year-old curly-headed boy, saying, "An" you've still got them? " She lifted one of the curls with her finger. " "[ thought you said you were goin' to have them off?"