Mary's Child (5 page)

But something held him then as he stood peering through the banister rails. Was it the silence of the house so he could hear clearly the slow ticking of the clock down there in the hall? Or Hilary Ballantyne’s stillness as she stood facing the door now, with head lifted and slightly turned as if listening – or waiting?

Jack heard no sound outside but then there came the softest tapping at the front door, that only came up to him because of that silence, that stillness. And now Hilary Ballantyne moved, quickly, her hand reaching up to the thin chain dangling from the gaslight. She tweaked it and the light faded and died. Jack blinked, then saw a strip of grey light from outside as the door was opened by his mother. That light was almost blotted out at once as someone came in and the door closed again, softly.

He could see nothing now in the sudden darkness, nor could those in the hall below. He heard the rap as a shoe kicked against a chair, then whispers soft as a breath and the slightest creaking of the carpeted stairs. As they came closer, up to the floor below his, he could hear the silken sliding of the dress, see the gleam of a white shirt-front hovering like a ghost in the gloom. The door of his mother’s room opened. Simpson had lit the light in there when she heard the carriage turn into the drive, and Jack saw the figures of his mother and the tall man with her outlined against that rectangle of light. Then the door closed behind them and he was left in darkness again.

Jack decided there was to be no party. He turned and padded quickly back to his bed, huddling down into the warm nest he had made for himself. He had not seen the man’s face but it had not been his grandfather. He could see the box of soldiers Grandad had given him; Amy Jenkinson had let him bring them in to lie by his bed through the night. He would be able to play with them in the morning.

He drifted off to sleep. Neither he nor anyone else heard Guy Davenham leave before the dawn, creeping down the stairs and letting himself out of the front door. He left Hilary Ballantyne sleeping and sated. Across the river Chrissie slept in the cot in the corner of the front room while her parents were in the bed.

Next day Chrissie did not remember the boy she had met in the park. Jack Ballantyne remembered her and reminded Amy Jenkinson, ‘I helped that little girl up on to the lion.’

‘Did you, Master Jack? You were a good boy. Now eat your porridge.’

He remembered his mother’s homecoming, too, but for some reason did not ask about that, and forgot it in a day or two. He was simply bewildered when she disappeared from his life a month later.

His grandfather came to the house, took the boy on his knee and told him, ‘You’re coming to live with me, Jack.’

As he played on the nursery floor with the soldiers his grandfather had given him he was conscious of some whispering between Simpson, Jenkinson and the others. He overheard a muttered, ‘She’s run off with him,’ and, ‘Poor little lamb.’

He was vaguely aware that he was being cuddled by Amy Jenkinson more than usual and he was glad of that. He felt no sense of loss. His mother had gone away just as his father did. Father returned now and again so presumably Mother would, too. Meanwhile he had Grandad and Jenkinson and he was content.

He went to live in the big house with the tall tower.

Chapter 3

March 1900

‘Now, we’ve got to get ready in a minute but I have some ironing I want to do.’ Mary Carter set the smoothing iron on the glowing fire and went on, ‘And we need something for your dad’s tea. Put your coat on and run up to the shops and get him a kipper.’

Chrissie was six years old now, brown eyes still large in the thin face. She had been at school over a year and all that time had helped Mary about the house, washing, cleaning and cooking. But she still had to stand on the stool to work on the table.

She needed the coat in the street. A wind was blowing up from the sea, bitterly cold, nipping at nose and ears. It had driven the gulls inland and they swooped and soared above, their mewing rising high above the metallic clamour from the yards. The sun was down and the lamplighter doing his rounds with his long pole, switching on the gas for the lights. The yards would cease work soon and Harry Carter would come home for his tea. Mist and shadows together clothed the tombstones in the churchyard of St  Peter’s at the end of the street.

An old woman stood on the doorstep of the house next door, peering shortsightedly. She had only moved into the downstairs rooms of that house a few days ago. Mary had told Harry, Chrissie listening, that she was ‘Old Mrs  Collins’, a widow. That was all Chrissie knew.

Now the old woman called, ‘Will you go a message for me? Me rheumatism’s that bad wi’ this wind, Ah canna get out.’

Chrissie knew about rheumatism, had heard Mary talk of other people in the street who suffered from it. Just as she knew about drunkenness and violence: she had seen Reuben Ward stagger by and crawl up the stairs, had heard his wife cry out and seen her battered face. Chrissie offered, ‘I’m just going up to the shops.’

Ada Collins peered at the thin, serious little face, pink cheeked now from the wind. ‘There’s a bonny lass. I’ll give you something for going.’

She held out a tin can with a lid and a wire carrying-handle, the same sort of can used by Harry Carter to carry his tea to work. ‘Look in the back door of the Pear Tree and get me a gill o’ beer. Can you do that?’

‘Yes, missus.’ Chrissie took the can and a penny from the old woman and started up the street.

She bought the kipper then went into the Bottle and Jug, a narrow little bar at the back of the Pear Tree public house, and got a half-pint of beer pumped into the can. When she delivered it to Mrs  Collins the old woman said, ‘There’s a good lass. Here’s a ha’penny for going.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Collins.’

Chrissie told her mother, ‘Mrs  Collins gave me a ha’penny for running a message for her.’

Mary Carter gave the child an affectionate pat. ‘Put it in your box.’ But then she went on to order, ‘Next time you do something for her, tell her you don’t want anything for going, because she’s an old woman on her own, living off a little bit of a pension. Don’t tell her
that
, mind! Now I’ll cook that kipper for your dad then I’ll get you ready to go out. I don’t want to be late.’

She had been given the chance to earn a few shillings that evening and had grabbed it. Harry had been on short time working since Christmas and Mary could only work while Chrissie was at school. So she picked up a few hours’ cleaning work here and there but it was poorly paid. She was a good manager of the household budget and they always had enough to eat, but some extra money was welcome.

A half-hour later Mary had paid her three halfpence and she and Chrissie were aboard one of the new electric trams, grinding across the bridge from Monkwearmouth into the town on the south shore. They were on their way to the Ballantyne house in Ashbrooke. The war in South Africa was lurching on its disastrous way. The Boers had surrounded the town of Ladysmith for three months and news of its relief had arrived only a day or two ago. There had been scenes of wild celebration. Now George Ballantyne was giving a thanksgiving party for some friends, extra staff would be needed and Mary was one of the girls who had been recruited.

She and Chrissie walked up from the tram stop in the darkness under the branches of the trees spread across the street, hurrying from one yellow gas lamp to the next. The wind had dropped now and the night was not so cold. They were further from the river and the sea, and more sheltered. They could see open fields through the wooded gaps between the big, widely spaced houses.

Mary said, ‘You want to look out. You might see rabbits around here.’

‘Rabbits!’

‘Or maybe a fox.’

Chrissie’s head turned continually after that. There wasn’t a rabbit or a fox within a mile of the shipyards and the street where she lived. The only grass near the street was in the churchyard.

They came upon the house through the tradesmen’s gate, then followed the tracks cut through the gravel of the drive by the horses and carts of the butchers and grocers who had preceded them. Chrissie caught her first glimpse of the house through the trees, wide and high with tall, ranked rectangles of windows blazing with light. And there was the tower standing high and black against the sky with one lone light in a window at its top. She was never to forget that first sighting.

But now they went on, around the side of the house, and entered the kitchen at the rear. They stepped into seeming bedlam. Most of one wall of the big room was taken up by the kitchen range, set into the chimney breast. The kitchen table, scrubbed white, covered half the floor area. It was a place of heat, steam, the smell of roasting meat and voices raised above the clatter of pans and plates. Mrs  Tyndall, the cook, a queen in her profession and so earning more than thirty pounds a year, worked furiously. She was helped by three nimble-fingered maids, pressed into service as assistant cooks. There were to be a dozen courses to choose from, including duck, salmon and lamb, and accompanied by a half-dozen different wines. The evening would cost George Ballantyne a good seventy pounds.

He did not mind. He was celebrating but not triumphant and said frankly, ‘I’ll just be damned glad when the war is over.’ But it would blunder on for another two years.

Betty Simpson had been taken on by George Ballantyne when his son Richard closed down his own house after the flight of his wife Hilary. Now Betty stood in a corner of the kitchen by the door leading to the front of the house, from where she marshalled the extra girls hired to ‘wait on’ for the evening. There were already eight or nine and Mary crossed with a whisk of skirts to join them. She already wore her best high-necked black dress and now stripped off her coat and hung it on a hook by the door. She pulled a white apron, like that worn by the other girls, out of her bag and knotted it deftly in the small of her back.

The single light at the top of the tower had come from the window of the crow’s nest. A ship’s captain had named the room thus after visiting George Ballantyne. From here he could look over the roofs of the town, down into the yards along the river and out to the sea beyond. He had built it for that reason. He lived by the sea. He was a builder of ships.

For a man of his wealth the room was simply furnished. There was a desk close to the window and two leather armchairs before the fire. A thick rug covered most of the polished floor while bookshelves and glass-cased models of ships he had built crowded the walls. The room smelt of leather and polish.

He was a little greyer now but still tall and straight, handsome in full evening dress of tails and starched shirt front. The town below was a sprinkling of lights, the sea a black and dull silver blanket. In this room he found the solitude of standing on a mountain top. He had always been a solitary man, more so after the death of his wife, a loving companion for twenty years. She had died out there when the packet from Hamburg foundered in winter gales.

He thought of her often and did so now, comparing her to Hilary Ballantyne. Richard had now divorced her and she was living in the South of France. Good riddance, he thought. But the affair had hurt his son. Little Jack, on the other hand, had not shed a tear. The old man thought shrewdly that the boy would certainly grieve if Jenkinson left him. The only good thing to come out of the whole unpleasant business was the boy coming to live with him.

That reminded him and he turned and glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, saw it was time to go. He walked down the wide, carpeted stairs that wound around the inside of the tower, and so came to the top floor of the house where his servants lived. Here, also, was the nursery. On the floor below, the first floor, were the rooms of Richard and himself, and those used by guests.

He entered the nursery. It was a middle-sized, square room, looking out on the front of the house. Two other doors opened out of it, one leading to Jack’s bedroom, the other to Amy Jenkinson’s. She had come to the house with Jack, along with Betty Simpson and his rocking-horse, which stood, splashed with colour, in a corner. A coal fire burned in the grate and the brass fire-irons and fender reflected its glow. Linoleum covered the floor but a rug lay before the fire. A flowered paper on the walls formed a backdrop for two pictures:
The Charge of the Light Brigade
and
Victory at Trafalgar
. A round table by the window had been set for supper and Jack had just finished eating.

He called, ‘Grandad!’ then jumped down from his chair, ran to meet his grandfather and clutched his leg. George stooped to ruffle his hair. Jack had grown several inches but that black hair was still rebellious, the blue eyes clear and sharp. He was ready for bed, dressing-gown wrapped over his nightshirt. Amy Jenkinson was folding the clothes he had discarded.

George picked up the boy, carried him to the armchair by the fire and sat down with Jack in his lap. ‘Now, what have you been doing today?’

They talked for a while, Jack trying to think back to recall the events in his childhood world, George nodding and looking appropriately serious or impressed, until he set the boy on his feet again and stood up. ‘I have to meet our guests.’ He cocked an eye at Amy Jenkinson, patiently standing by, and asked, ‘Has he been a good boy?’

Amy pursed her lips, then said, ‘I think so, sir.’