Spilt Milk (6 page)

A late summer storm woke her and she stood watching yellow lightning illuminating the river. The wind shook the black poplar trees, making their ancient limbs groan and murmur. They sounded like a choir of voices. Like gossips chattering, recounting a scandalous tale.
I hear them too
, she heard Rose say, her voice rattling the window frames.

Harvests were brought in and the land ploughed into stiff clay furrows. Still Nellie did not come back. The bees in the orchard swarmed and disappeared, leaving their hives to be squatted by woodlice and earwigs. The trees bent to the ground, their limbs heavy with fruit. Overripe apples scented the air, and mornings turned damp and misty.

Louisa came to gather windfalls with her mother, Anna Moats. The two of them remarked upon Vivian’s changing looks. They told her she must be a late bloomer. Even Vivian could see it. In the small hand mirror the sisters owned, she saw how her eyes shone. Her face had filled out and softened. Her blonde hair was thick and lustrous.

Vivian should find herself a husband, Louisa teased.

Vivian believed she deserved nothing of the sort. If they knew what she had done, they would have banished her from their company.

‘My sister Nellie will be home soon,’ she told them, as if this was more important than any talk of husbands.

At Christmas, the vicar dropped off a package from his wife. A blood-red paisley-patterned dress, and a soft woollen shawl, slightly holed by moths.

‘It’s blue,’ said Vivian, holding the shawl up.

‘You have worn black long enough now, Vivian. We hope to see you at church with your sister when she returns.’

Vivian wore the shawl and it was a comfort to her. She sat upstairs in her bedroom, letting out her waistbands and sewing extra seams in her blouses. Every night she dreamed of Joe Ferier coming to her bed. She woke in the mornings lonelier and hungrier than ever.

When Vivian had put the hagstone on the table and the sisters had stared at Joe’s hat, retrieved from their bed, Nellie had wanted to hurt Vivian. Instead she had gone to the river to swim. When she got back she dressed in her best clothes and stood for a long time in their bedroom, watching Vivian sleeping, standing over her, listening to her breathing. Nellie put the hagstone on her pillow, picked up her suitcase and tiptoed downstairs. She could never harm Vivian but she could not stay with her either.

All through the night as she walked, she heard Rose’s voice, recounting stories of criminals and murderers. Though she told herself she was not afraid, she didn’t risk stopping to sleep in a haystack or barn. She was not given to this kind of fear, but then, she concluded, she had been innocent before. Only those who had known or witnessed bad things knew the kind of treachery the night hid.

She reached the town at dawn, just as the factory workers were crowding the streets on their way to work. She sat down on a bench by the corn exchange and slept. In the afternoon the sound of a barrel organ woke her. The monkey she had given money to just days before came and sat beside her, offering a slice of apple. She took the fruit gratefully, and the man turning the barrel said he remembered her.

‘You’re our lucky shilling lady. Yes, I remember you. The name’s Eddie Samson. You all right, Miss?’

‘Not really,’ said Nellie. She was too tired to be shy. ‘What’s the monkey’s name?’

‘This is Delilah. Do you get it? Samson and Delilah. Quite the couple we make, me as bald as a baby’s you-know-what and her
all covered in black hair like a heathen. Delilah is fussy about who she likes, but I can see she’s taken a shine to you. If Delilah likes you, then so do I.’

He offered Nellie a sandwich, and she let Delilah sit on her knee and pull felt violets from her hat while she ate.

At the end of the day, when he packed up his barrel organ, Eddie said he could not leave a lonely damsel in distress. He would help her in any way he could. The best start, he said, was to have a drink.

At the docks, the pub was full of noise and crowds. Nellie and Eddie sat in a room with black-painted floorboards, drinking gin and playing dominoes. She had never been in a bar before. The heat of the room and the crowded faces stunned Nellie. All the voices rising up sounded to her like the croaking madness of frogs in spring rain.

The first drink made her dizzy, and she was so busy watching the people, she lost one game of dominoes after another. The next drink loosened her tongue. She laughed and cracked jokes like a man, her elbows splayed, hair falling over her eyes, her mouth hanging open, trying to stop the thoughts of Vivian and Joe that came to her, washing back and forth in her mind.

A woman with a mouth like a spoonful of red jam bent over Eddie, lifted his soft cap and kissed him on the head. He grabbed her around the waist and plunged his face against her chest. Then she pushed him away and stumbled on to another table, collapsing into the lap of another man.

‘Look at you, you dear girl!’ Eddie said to Nellie. ‘Frightened witless! You’re surely too old for such innocence? You got a strict father who’s hidden you away all these years, is that what it is?’

‘I have not got a father,’ she slurred. ‘I have a sister.’

‘Mother Superior’s kept you under lock and key, has she? I’ll look after you, dearie. What you need is a plate of fish and chips and another drink.’

They ate and drank, and Nellie explained how the river had
brought Joe Ferier to her. It had brought him to her, and then her sister had fallen in love with him.

‘Ah, love.’ Eddie leaned his elbows on the table, his face sorrowful. ‘Love’s a tricky so-and-so. I’d give up on this Joe chappie. Forget him. He sounds like the sort who likes to break hearts.’

‘No,’ said Nellie. ‘No, it wasn’t him. It was my sister. She stole him.’

‘But did he ever belong to you in the first place, my dear? Did she steal him or did he steal her? Seems to me they both treated you badly. You lost out both ways, didn’t you? Have another drink, why don’t you.’

In the noise and crush of drinkers, Eddie said he had a feather bed. Big as a boat it was, and so deep you thought you’d never stop falling into it. ‘Closest you’ll get to heaven,’ he said, and stroked her arm. ‘Aren’t I the fool, spending all my money on you and then offering you my bed too.’

Nellie stood by the door of the bar while Eddie bought a jug of beer to take away. The monkey climbed on Nellie’s shoulder. Outside, the ships in the docks loomed like black mountains. Was Joe Ferier camped out in his canvas tent? She wanted to see him. To ask, had it been him or Vivian who’d sought the other out? She looked back at Eddie, who had his arms around the woman with the red mouth.

Nellie sat down on the roadside, resting her head against the wall of the bar. She was so tired. A feather bed did sound like heaven. Her own bed at home would be even better.

The next thing she knew, someone was wafting smelling salts under her nose. A green glass bottle waved in front of her, and she coughed and spluttered.

‘Come on now,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘You can’t sleep out here, love. The police will take you away.’

It was the woman who had kissed Eddie. She wore a wide-brimmed hat and a soft gauzy scarf around her narrow shoulders.
Her black coat reached to her ankles, her bosom was lifted high, her waist small and waspish.

‘Your mouth is the colour of raspberry jam,’ said Nellie.

‘She’s dead drunk. Leave her. She’ll be all right.’

‘Eddie, have a heart. You got her in this state. You can’t just leave her.’

Nellie felt Eddie and the woman lift her up. They walked her down the street. She tripped up a step and went through a door. Then they lay her down on a bed. It was hard and lumpy, but she was tired and she closed her eyes with relief.

When she woke the next morning, she was on a threadbare settee with a coat over her. She lay there, unsure of what to do. Just as she thought she should get up and leave, the woman from the night before came in wearing a pale pink dressing gown, her hair loose in waves around her shoulders. She handed Nellie a cup of tea.

‘I’m Jane. Eddie’s wife. Don’t look so frightened, dear.’

It was on and off between her and Eddie, she explained. She wanted to know how long Nellie had known him.

‘I gave the monkey a shilling last week. Then I saw them again yesterday.’

‘That’s what Eddie says. You’re not his type anyway. He tells me you’re down on your luck. Is that the truth of it?’

Nellie’s head ached and she felt sick. She told her everything. She was aware as she talked that her openness was not expected. Had she said too much? Rose always said other people should never know your business.

‘So you’re quite alone?’

Nellie nodded. She could not go home. She needed a job. A room and a job. She was a hard worker.

‘I’ve got a friend who might help you. Her brother’s looking for a woman to work for him. You get yourself ready.’

Jane gave Nellie a jug of water and a bowl to wash in. When she was ready, she took her to a café to meet a friend called Trixie.
Then she left her, telling her in future to stay away from other women’s husbands.

‘You been causing trouble?’ asked Trixie. ‘You a husband stealer?’

‘Never,’ said Nellie, affronted by the accusation. She looked at the woman’s lined face. She had the feeling Jane had left her here to get rid of her and that there was no job.

‘On your own, are you? Me too. I lost my husband ten years ago, sorry little widow that I am.’

Nellie said she felt she had lost enough to qualify as a kind of widow too.

Trixie knew what it was like to fall on hard times. Her husband had died owing money, and she’d lost her home and was living with her old mother and working as a draper’s assistant.

She pressed a handkerchief to her eyes. ‘I’ve been ruined by marriage. He took my best years, and all the time he was spending every penny we had. The best I can do is try again. Get married, I mean. Good or bad, every woman needs a husband. I’ve found myself a better candidate this time. A very good man.’ She smiled, and nudged Nellie in the ribs. ‘He’s dependable, sensible, and as boring as a closed-up pub on a Sunday.’

He was a draper whose wife had died a year ago, and she felt he was ready to marry her. The trouble was he didn’t want to move in with Trixie and her mother, and Trixie didn’t want to move into the flat above his shop.

‘Her spirit’s there. His dead wife. I feel like I’m going to suffocate in her curtains and soft furnishings. I’m trying to persuade him to sell the flat and get a new house. There are some lovely new villas out on the London Road. Gardens front and back.’

It rained all morning and the two women sat slowly sipping their tea in the café, next to the window, watching the umbrellas of hurrying passers-by.

‘Well,’ said Trixie when the rain stopped and the waitress had asked if they were going to buy another pot of tea. ‘We can’t sit here all day. We should go and see about this job for you.’

The sun shone a dirty yellow through grey clouds. Everything – windows, shopfronts, trees, hat brims – dripped water. Nellie’s suitcase was falling apart. It wouldn’t last another night homeless, and neither would she.

Trixie took her to a green-tiled shopfront with pig carcasses hanging from hooks in the window. A great row of them dangled like giant sugar mice, waxy and pink and bright with raindrops. To enter the shop and stand in its cold interior with its smell of meat and pine sawdust, Nellie had to lower her head and walk under a bower of dripping pigs’ trotters.

Trixie’s brother, Nathan Rumsby, wore a spotless striped apron. He was a bland-looking man with small eyes, close set and framed by thick lashes, so it was hard to tell what colour they were. With his butcher’s cap on his head he came up to Nellie’s shoulder. When he took it off, revealing a head of fine blond hair, he was an inch shorter.

The butcher said he hadn’t heard of any Joe Ferier, but he had a room she could have if she worked hard. He couldn’t pay her much, but she could start right away. He’d feed her and she’d have lodgings for free.

‘Hard work rewards itself,’ said Nellie, thanking him. She was surprised to hear Rose’s favourite phrase slip so easily from her lips.

As the weeks passed, Nellie became immune to the loneliness within her. The work wasn’t so bad here. It was blood she scrubbed out from under her fingernails these days rather than earth. Not what she had imagined, perhaps, but she clung to her new life, believing that this was what she needed, this solitude, a chance to see what fate had in mind for her.

She saw Eddie again by chance, walking by the docks, but he looked straight past her, as if he didn’t know her, and she decided it was better that way. He was a married man. It made her blush to think of his invitation to share his feather bed.

One night in October when the moon shone through her
curtainless windows, she woke and saw the butcher standing in the room. He was naked, his skin as bloodless as uncooked tripe. There was a curved thickness to his thighs, his belly round and solid. She heard him go away, the door closing behind him. Nellie pulled her blankets around herself.

The next day Rumsby acted as if nothing had happened. His eyes, which she finally worked out were a dirty moss colour, were as restless as ever, flicking over her and then away to the carcasses he was cutting up. The next night he was there again, at the foot of her bed. And the night after that. After a while, Nellie slept through his visits, only waking to hear him make a small groaning sound, his naked feet slapping the bare floorboards as he hurriedly left the room.

Winter wound its scarf of frost around the town. The bacon in the butcher’s shop carried diamond-sharp ice crystals in its thick bands of fat. Nellie worked 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., six days a week. Her days off she spent looking for Joe. She often went down to the docks. She thought he might be there, thinking of finding a ship to sail to Southampton, where the steamers left for America. She liked the docks and stood on the quay, watching the trading ships and the barges heavy with cargo. They drifted low in the water, loaded with coal, coke, malt, lime and bricks. It was amazing to see how this stretch of their river, so many miles away from home, was solid with traffic. To think of the isolated stretch of river her own cottage sat on.

On Sundays, she tidied the flat and the butcher visited his mother, taking meat pies and parcels of pork for her. Rumsby dressed up then, a good hat and a thick wool coat, his boots polished, his beard trimmed. He rubbed lard into his fingers to make them soft because he said his mother liked to hold his hand. Nellie couldn’t imagine anybody would want to hold his hands if they knew what he did in her room at night.

At Christmas, he invited Nellie to accompany him. His mother
lived in a house near the park. Nellie sat on an upholstered chair with the stuffing coming out of it. The striped wallpaper on the walls was faded and falling down in places. Trixie served candied fruits and mince pies on a tray.

‘She doesn’t hear,’ said Trixie when Nellie spoke to her mother. ‘Deaf, dearie. She can’t see too well neither, and her waterworks have sprung a leak. If I had the money I’d pay a nurse to look after her. I’m worn out by the old bird.’

The butcher sat on the sofa by the gas fire, holding his mother’s hand. Nellie ate nothing, said very little and felt out of place. She realized she missed her home and the comfort of Vivian’s company.

‘Cold meats,’ said Rumsby as Trixie ushered them into the dining room where she lit the gas lamps. ‘We’ll have cold meats and bread and butter with a glass of cider.’

Nellie sat at the table with the mother. Through the open door, she heard Trixie talking to her brother in the hallway. She was praising Nellie. Saying what a hard worker she was and he wouldn’t find better. Nellie leaned slightly towards the door. A look of fear passed over the butcher’s mother’s face. The old woman clutched her throat and gave a small cry of alarm. A puddle of yellow urine steamed around her shoes.