Laceys of Liverpool (40 page)

‘He might be a Protestant.’

‘For God’s sake, Mam,’ Fion said, exasperated. ‘As if that matters at your age.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ Alice promised, though she had no intention of doing any such thing.

That night the television was on but Alice wasn’t watching. Instead, she was going over the events of the afternoon. She didn’t want to leave Amber Street, let alone travel to the other side of the world. She didn’t even want her humdrum life interrupted by having dinner with a man she hardly knew.

She wasn’t particularly happy, but nor was she particularly sad. She just existed, went from day to day, living a life in which little happened that was exciting or remarkable. Babies were born; people died; there was an occasional juicy bit of gossip in the salon; she sometimes went to the pictures with Bernadette; her children and
their
children came to tea on Sundays. Every now and then she threw a party. She’d got used to being the proprietor of three hairdressing salons and they had long ceased to be a source of pride.

It wasn’t much of a life, but it was the life she wanted.

No one thought to close the curtains when Alice Lacey held a party on Christmas Eve. From the parlour a sharp ray of yellow light fanned across the dimly lit street. There were other parties in Amber Street that night, other lights, making the unlit areas darker and more starkly defined, shadowy. It was a beautiful night, calm and tranquil, not particularly cold for the time of year. There was no moon, but the black sky was littered with stars.

The solitary figure of a woman lurked in the shadows outside the Laceys’, peering through the window, dodging from one side of the glass to the other. The woman wore the same camel coat, the same clumsy fur-lined boots that she’d worn four years before when she’d spied on Cormac’s twenty-first. She spied on him now, watched him lounging against the wall, looking a bit fed up, she thought.

She was disappointed in her son, who’d given up university for some reason and had actually been seen in the labour exchange, shamelessly queuing for his dole money. She didn’t approve of his long hair and the way he dressed, like he’d just picked stuff out of a ragbag. The girl, Pol, was there, obviously in the club. No one knew if she and Cormac were married. By all accounts Alice kept her mouth firmly buttoned when she was asked.

In fact, Maurice looked far more presentable, in a blue check shirt and nicely pressed grey pants. He and the Pol girl seemed to be getting on like a house on fire. They’d been laughing together on the settee for almost an hour.

Cora’s lips bared in a snarl when Fionnuala came into the room with a plate of sandwiches. She’d very much like to know what favours Fion Lacey had done for Horace Flynn so that he’d seen fit to leave her his lovely big house, yet hadn’t thought to let
her
have a penny.

Billy was there
! Billy had come into the parlour supping a can of beer. Her own husband had been invited to Alice’s party and hadn’t said a word – not that they normally exchanged many words. There’d just been those weeks while John was living with them. Since then the usual silence had prevailed.

John!

She hadn’t cried much in her life, but she still cried when she thought about John and the future that had been denied them – the future
together
. It would always remain a mystery why he’d left Garibaldi Road so suddenly. That morning she’d woken up, felt for him, but he wasn’t there! After Billy had gone to work she’d rushed around to the yard. But it was already on fire, blazing away, throwing sparks into the sky. Someone must have called the fire engine, because it arrived almost straight away. She had stayed for hours, watching the building fall to pieces, watching the flames gradually subside, watching the firemen carry out something on a stretcher.

There didn’t look to be much left of John under the tarpaulin. She longed to snatch it off and kiss the burnt remains of the only man she had ever loved. Cora clenched her fists and her nails bit into the soft flesh of her palms.

A burst of laughter came from inside the house whose occupants interested her so greatly. Billy, of all people, had made a puppet out of his hand and was making it talk. She couldn’t hear what it was saying, but everyone was falling about.

Fion suddenly leapt to her feet and closed the curtains, and Cora was left desolate, with nothing to see.

In the parlour Fion shuddered and said to nobody in particular, ‘It’s funny, but I felt as if there was someone watching us from outside.’

It was April Fool’s Day and the baby had taken it into its head to fool them by arriving early, though Pol had always been vague about the date. Cormac opened the window, put a tape of soothing music in the tape recorder and lit a fresh joss stick.

‘Take deep breaths, Pol. Really deep now,’ he instructed when the labour appeared to be reaching a climax. He sat on the edge of the bed and took several deep breaths himself to demonstrate how. ‘Sing your song. “Here we go round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush. Here we . . .” ’ he warbled very much out of tune.

Pol screamed.

‘I didn’t think it was all that bad,’ Cormac joked.

Pol screamed again. There was a veil of perspiration on her brow and her body was rigid with fear.

‘Push,’ he commanded, determined to stay calm. ‘No, don’t push. Oh, where’s that bloody instruction book?’

‘On the table,’ Pol yelled. ‘Cormac, I think I need to go to hospital.’

‘But we were going to do this by ourselves!’

‘No, Cormac.
I
was going to do it by myself.
You
were going to help and you’re not helping a bit. Ooh!’ she groaned. ‘I never knew you could be in such pain. Fetch your Fion. She might know what to do.’

‘She’s gone to a coffee morning.’ Cormac felt a stir of panic. ‘I’ll ring for the ambulance.’

‘Do it quickly, Cormac. Please!’

Two hours later Pol was delivered of a perfect baby girl weighing six pounds, two ounces. Mother and baby seemed unharmed after what had turned out to be an unexpected ordeal.

‘Who does she look like?’ Pol asked Cormac when he was allowed in to see her and the new baby. ‘Wally, Frank the Yank, or you?’

Cormac had thought he wouldn’t care, but when he stared at the little, round, scrunched-up face discovered, somewhat surprisingly, that he did. ‘Me. She looks like me,’ he claimed, despite the fact that the baby had red hair exactly the same shade as Frank the Yank’s.

Pol touched her on her tiny ball of a chin. ‘Say hello to mummy and daddy, Skylark.’

Cormac groaned. ‘Oh, no, Pol. Not Skylark.’ He thought they’d dispensed with Skylark. It had been Buttercup for a girl the last time they’d discussed names.

‘It’s a lovely name, Skylark.’

‘Except this is Liverpool. It isn’t full of flower people like San Francisco. Everyone will poke fun at her at school. I suggest we call her something else as well, say . . .’ He said the first name that came into his head: ‘Sharon! Skylark can be her second name.’

‘All right, Cormac,’ Pol said, easygoing to a fault.

‘That girl of Cormac’s, she had her baby this morning,’ Billy told his son when he called in Lacey’s Tyres at teatime, ‘
TYRES FITTED ON THE PREMISES
’it said on the newly painted board outside.

Maurice drew in a quick intake of breath. ‘What did she have?’

‘A girl. A pretty little thing, according to Alice. Going to call her Sharon.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘Business good today?’ The plan was for Billy to continue going out to work until the firm was doing well enough to keep them both busy.

‘Not exactly.’ Maurice pulled a face. ‘Two cars, that’s all, and only three tyres between them.’

‘Things’ll improve, son,’ Billy said stoutly. ‘Once word gets around how cheap we are.’

‘It takes time for word to get around, Dad. We need to advertise now.’

‘Can’t afford it, Maurice, lad. We’ve used up all the bank loan to buy stock and do up the yard. They’re expecting us to start paying the loan back in the not too distant future.’

‘I know, Dad.’ Maurice glanced fearfully around the yard that had once housed B.E.D.S. The cheap retreads from Hungary were stacked in neat heaps around the wall – it hadn’t exactly been cheap to buy so many. Then there was the smart hut that had been erected in place of the burnt-out building because it was essential to have an office of some sort; the telephone; the sign; the secondhand van, bought when John’s old van proved beyond repair; the chicken-wire roof they’d had put up when they discovered two boys fishing over the wall for tyres with a giant hook.

He wasn’t making enough to live on, let alone pay back the loan. Dad didn’t realise you could go to prison for defaulting on a loan – it was
him
who’d go, not Maurice, because it was taken out in his name. He’d been getting on well with his dad since Uncle John’s funeral. There hadn’t been the opportunity when he was growing up to discover how kind Billy was – and he’d worked like a Trojan getting the yard ready. Over the
last few months Billy’s support for his son had been rock solid.

Maurice felt nausea rise, like a ball, in his throat. Everything was his fault. He’d thought all you had to do to start a business was find the premises, stock them with whatever you wanted to sell and that was it. You were made; the customers would come flocking in. Perhaps they would have if there’d been adverts in the press, or the site weren’t so much out of the way. As it was, hardly anyone knew they were there. Every day Maurice felt more desperate and the feeling of nausea was never far away.

‘Which hospital is Pol in?’ he asked when Billy emerged from the hut with two mugs of tea.

‘Liverpool Maternity. Why? Are you thinking of going to see her?’

‘I might,’ Maurice muttered. It was another thing that added to his misery, thinking about Pol. Maurice wasn’t sure, but he had a feeling he was in love with her. They’d first met at Alice’s party on Christmas Eve and he’d been unable to stop thinking about her since. He’d started going round to the house in Stanley Road on the pretence of seeing Fion, but in reality to see Pol. Something about her childish fragility struck a chord in his heart. He wanted to look after her, cherish her, keep her warm at night. He had stupid visions of them growing old together, stupid because she belonged to his cousin, Cormac. There was a saying, ‘All’s fair in love and war’, but Maurice was fond of Cormac and couldn’t bring himself to steal his girl from behind his back, always assuming Pol was willing to be stolen in the first place.

Mind you, Cormac was no longer the person he used to be. He looked a proper ponce in those daft clothes and had made no attempt to get a job. Although he
hadn’t been successful, at least Maurice had tried to find work. These days he didn’t feel as inferior to his cousin as he used to.

‘I think I’ll close early tonight, Dad.’ Lacey’s Tyres was open twelve hours a day, from seven in the morning till seven at night.

‘No,’ Billy said stubbornly. ‘I’d sooner we stuck to the hours it ses on the board. You sod off, son. I’ll lock up.’

Alice and her daughters were just leaving the hospital when Maurice arrived bearing a meagre bunch of flowers that was all he could afford. Cormac had gone in search of tea, he was told, and baby Sharon was in the nursery.

‘You can keep Pol company till the new dad comes back,’ Alice suggested.

‘Hello, Pol. Congratulations.’ Her eyes lit up as he approached the bed, but Pol’s eyes lit up for everyone. She wore a faded cotton nightie that hadn’t been ironed. He wished he could have bought her something rich and silky, trimmed with lace, but not only did he not have the money, it wasn’t done for men to buy nighties for other men’s girls.

‘Thank you, Maurice. Are those for me?’ She gasped, as if he’d presented her with a magnificent bouquet of roses. ‘They’re lovely. What are they?’

‘Dunno.’

‘They’re very pretty, whatever they are. I’ll ask the nurse to put them in water after you’ve gone. How’s business?’

Pol was one of the few people in whom Maurice had confided the true state of Lacey’s Tyres. If anyone else asked he would reply modestly, ‘Not bad.’

‘Bloody awful,’ he said gloomily. ‘I’m worried sick, if you must know.’

‘Oh, you poor thing,’ she said, her blue, doll-like eyes
so full of sympathy that Maurice easily could have cried. He longed to bury his head in her small breasts and sob his heart out. ‘Things will buck up soon, Maurice. They’re bound to.’

‘I hope so.’ He explained about not earning enough to pay back the loan. ‘It’s me dad who worries me. He’s the one who’ll get into trouble, not me.’

‘Perhaps you should expand, Maurice, sell more than tyres.’ She waved her arm vaguely. ‘Other bits for motor cars, fr’instance: brakes and stuff.’ She patted his hand, when it should have been
him
patting
her
hand, her being the one in hospital, like.

‘Gosh, Pol, I hadn’t thought of that.’ It was a good idea, but he hadn’t the cash to buy so much as a tyre gauge. Still, she meant well. ‘You’re very clever, Pol,’ he said admiringly.

‘Me!’ She laughed. ‘What a lovely thing to say. Everyone usually thinks I’m very stupid.’

‘You’re anything but stupid,’ Maurice said, meaning it sincerely.

Cormac was about to enter the ward when, through the glass panel in the swing door, he saw his cousin, Maurice, sitting beside Pol’s bed. He always felt uncomfortable with Maurice, as if he had stolen from him something of incalculable value. One of these days, when Alice was dead, he might tell Maurice the truth about their parentage, something that was out of the question while Alice remained alive. He, Cormac, had lived twenty-one enjoyable years of Maurice’s life, while Maurice had endured twenty-one years on
his
behalf with Cora.

Once again Cormac went to push open the door and once again he paused. Maurice was leaning on the bed, arms crossed, laughing at something Pol had said.
Unaware he was being watched, his face was naked, showing everything, hiding nothing, and Cormac realised with a shock that his cousin was head over heels in love with Pol.