The Corner House (17 page)

George Hardman shook his head. ‘No, that’s not the case. I wanted to dirty her, make her less than human, make myself less than human.’ He looked down at his hands, as if he expected to see filthy claws rather than well-manicured fingernails. ‘She’s hardly come out of her bedroom for the last six months. Not when I’ve been in the house, anyway. I don’t like her. I could stay on at home without loving, but not without liking. So I’ve been shifting money, salting it away. When Ged gets back from the war, he’ll be in charge of the tannery.’ He smiled grimly. ‘What’s left of it. They deserve one another, Lily and Ged.’

Maurice swallowed. ‘Where will you go?’

For the first time, George Hardman grinned properly. ‘I’m running away with Emily Birchall,’ he sighed blissfully. ‘Her husband died early on in the war, some sort of stomach thing he picked up in barracks.’

‘She’s your secretary.’ Maurice’s tone was accusing.

‘Yes.’

‘And she’s only about twenty-five,’ continued the jeweller.

‘Twenty-seven,’ George said. ‘A nice, gentle girl. There’s been no funny business, mind, just a peck on the cheek now and then. I shall get divorced. My solicitor’s holding enough evidence against Lily and the vicar. I don’t reckon the reverend’s chances of turning out to be Archbishop of Canterbury after this little lot.’

‘Well, bugger me,’ said Alan Betteridge.

George, in happier mood now that his intentions had been aired, managed a laugh. ‘No, thanks.’

Maurice was thoughtful. ‘So it’ll be down to me and Alan, then. I take it you won’t be sending money for the Nolans?’

‘I might,’ replied George. ‘Depends, I suppose. But I will keep in touch.’

Troubled glances passed between Maurice and Alan. George Hardman, richer than the two of them put together, was going to clear off. ‘When do you go?’ asked Maurice.

‘When I’ve spoken face-to-face with Ged and his mother. There’ll still be a tannery for them to run, but they must start from as near to scratch as I dare leave them.’

The jeweller groaned. ‘We’ll all suffer, man,’ he exclaimed. ‘You employ a fair number in this town. Who’s going to want brooches and beds if they’ve no jobs?’

George nodded benignly. ‘That’s your problem, not mine. I don’t mean to sound so callous, but my marriage has been hell on earth, so I’m saving my own skin this time instead of worrying about cowhide.’ He nodded. ‘There’s no need for the captain to go down with the ship.’ He blinked rapidly, realized that he was drunk and muttering what almost amounted to gibberish. ‘Emily and I will be climbing into a lifeboat,’ he concluded, the words colliding with each other as they fell from his lips.

‘You’re scuttling the bloody ship, you are.’ Alan Betteridge, whose wife had cleared off years earlier with the insurance man, quietened after a few seconds, becoming almost pensive. ‘Oh, do what you
must,’ he added softly. ‘You wonder where you went wrong, don’t you?’

Maurice Chorlton kept his counsel. A widower, he saw himself as clean where marital matters were concerned. George Hardman had married a sex-crazed witch, while Alan Betteridge’s wife, tired of being a punchbag for her inebriate partner, had absconded in the company of a nice, quiet, bespectacled chap with bicycle clips and an insurance round.

George cleared his throat. ‘I went wrong the minute I bought three diamonds on a twist from you, Maurice. As soon as Lily got that ring on, she started having ideas. I mean, you both remember my dad, solid as a rock, no airs and graces. But the top of Deane Road wasn’t good enough for Lily. Oh no, we had to buy The Villa, five bedrooms, conservatory, big gardens, then a couple of servants living in the roof space. I must have stripped the skins off a thousand animals just to pay for the curtains.’

Maurice sighed. ‘You’ve to forgive and forget, George. That’s what marriage is all about—’

‘Forgive and for-bloody-get?’ roared the tanner, the veins across his temples throbbing in the heat of anger and drunkenness. ‘I found her with the gardener when she was six months gone with our Ged! She’s … there’s something wrong with her.’

Maurice smiled reassuringly at the bartender and a small clutch of greengrocers three tables away. ‘Keep your voice down,’ he muttered.

George gripped the edge of the table. ‘I’m going,’ he said, quieter now. ‘Once the troops are home and the ink’s dry on Churchill’s bits of paper, I’m taking Emily abroad, somewhere nice and warm. There’ll be no more work for either of us.’ He blinked against
a temporary doubt. Life without work could well turn out to be fish without chips, a cart with no horse. ‘We might buy a little café or something,’ he added lamely. ‘Just to keep us out of mischief.’

The jeweller closed his eyes and leaned back against a mahogany panel. Ged Hardman couldn’t run a bath, let alone a tannery. Like Maurice Chorlton’s own son, the tanner’s boy was not particularly interested in his family’s business. ‘I can’t see Roy knowing a Ceylon sapphire from a blue topaz. As for your Ged, the stench at Hardman’s will make him fetch up last night’s beer.’

The furnisher shrugged. ‘Aye, and our Teddy’s not what you might call a gift from heaven. The last time I left him in charge, he sold a chest of drawers for next to nothing, got the prices mixed up. And he scratched a good dining table. Inlaid, it was. Octagonal.’ Alan was fed up. Utility had marked his card, had shifted him into the second-hand market. ‘We’ve no support from our sons, none of us,’ he moaned.

George Hardman stood up. ‘I’m off now,’ he said. Back to that house, back to a silence punctuated only by the chiming of clocks and the mewing of Lily’s Persians. Lily’s Persians were flaming nuisances. They dropped hair, shredded upholstery, clawed at clothing. ‘No use sitting here,’ he told his companions. ‘Get up, get out and get a life worth living.’

Maurice Chorlton didn’t want any changes. He loved gems and precious metals, could not wait for the war to end. ‘We’ll miss you,’ he told the owner of Hardman’s Hides. ‘But Alan and I are set in our ways.’ Without George, Maurice would be stuck with Alan Betteridge, welded to him by the sins of their sons. George Hardman had a bit of class, but the
furniture salesman was crude, vulgar and alarmingly uninhibited.

In a rare moment of empathy, Alan Betteridge rose and shook George Hardman’s hand. ‘I’ll be sorry to see you leave Bolton,’ he said. ‘You’ve been a good mate to me and Mo.’

‘Mo’ shivered. Maurice was not the name he might have chosen for himself, but Mo was dreadful.

‘As I said before, I’ll keep in touch.’ He extracted his fingers from Alan’s vice-like grip, then directed a few words at the seated jeweller. ‘I’ll leave something in an account for the Nolans. Talk to my solicitor when things get hot, let him do the sorting out.’

Left alone with Alan Betteridge, Maurice drew a hand across his forehead as if smoothing the path for a headache borrowed from his companion. ‘What on earth will Lily Hardman do with a tannery?’ he mused aloud.

Betteridge shrugged. ‘There’s some big lads working in yon factory. She’ll have plenty to keep her busy, I daresay.’

Maurice shuddered. With George Hardman, there had been decent conversation; with Alan, there was little more than utter tomfoolery. ‘Do you ever take anything seriously?’ asked the jeweller now.

Betteridge considered the question. ‘Money, I take that serious, I dare say. And Hilda going off to live in a slum with that stupid bugger was a bit of a sobering experience.’

‘Yet you carry on acting the goat.’

Alan stared hard at his companion. ‘What’s the alternative? Finish up a picture of misery like you? They call you Maurice the Mole, you know, and—’

‘Yes, I’m aware of that.’

‘Because you’re so …’ Greasy wouldn’t do. Oily would be far too unkind. ‘Well, the way you treat folk, crawling halfway up their backsides so’s they’ll buy a dearer watch.’

‘That’s called salesmanship, Alan.’

‘Where I come from, it’s called arse-kissing.’

‘It works.’

Alan lit a Pasha, coughing as he exhaled the pungent, harsh tobacco. ‘Then all that Methodism lark … I mean, what do you want to be joining the Holy Joes for? Stood up there every Sunday in your black suit, listening to folk going on about drinking and smoking. I went to school, you know. I were taught about loving thy bloody neighbour. If you’re a true Christian, I’ll eat my next delivery of bedroom suites. Religion’s about more than church, lad. See, I’m no hypocrite. I know I’m in business for the money and not to help worthy causes.’

Maurice felt the heat in his face. ‘Are you calling me a hypocrite?’

‘Please yourself,’ came the swift response. ‘Wear the bloody cap if it fits. You’ve stuff stashed on Deansgate as’d keep a family in food for donkey’s years. Can’t you be honest? What’s wrong with being a clever so-and-so? Only don’t go bleating to Jesus on a Sunday, because the rest of the week you’re as near a copy to Scrooge as anybody could imagine.’

Maurice suddenly sensed a weakness in his knees, was glad that he was seated. How could a man as low as this one cause Maurice Chorlton to feel … confused? Maurice had always managed to keep his mind clear and sure, had been convinced of the correctness of his lifestyle. God was for Sundays and business was what happened for the other six days.

‘I’m sorry,’ mumbled Alan Betteridge.

The jeweller blinked.

‘I mean, I shouldn’t be criticizing and …’ His voice faded to nothing.

‘Why are we doing it?’ Maurice asked.

‘Eh?’

‘Working. Saving. For what?’

Alan placed the Turkish cigarette in an ashtray, allowed the tasteless thing to cremate its own remains. ‘For our sons?’ he pondered. ‘For posterity?’

Maurice shook his head. ‘Let’s be honest for once. Is your Teddy going to make a success of Betteridge’s Fine Furnishings? Is my son interested in the manufacture of jewellery?’

The furniture salesman leaned back in his seat. ‘Our Teddy wants a bellyful of ale every night and a woman on Fridays, specially one as won’t make any trouble, won’t want a wedding ring in exchange for favours, like.’

‘While Roy thinks he’s a cut above the rest of them.’

Alan bit back the opinion that Roy had taken after his father.

‘We do the job because it’s there,’ said Maurice. ‘Because we’ve got into the habit, because we’ve lived through two wars and a depression.’ He looked at his companion. ‘Too late to change, Alan. We are formed and we can’t alter our ways.’

‘Aye, you could be right there.’ Alan wished he’d never started this particular conversation. Things were getting a bit philosophical, and he wasn’t quite up to putting the world right after three pints and two shorts.

‘I can’t help it,’ continued Maurice Chorlton. ‘I see a nice bit of silver and I have to have it. You see a
brass bedstead at a clearing-out sale and you grab it, clean it up and sell it.’

‘But I don’t go mee-mawing in a pew every flaming Sunday.’

‘Well, I do,’ replied Maurice heatedly. ‘And I can’t see why that makes me any worse than you. Perhaps I am a hypocrite, but I try to make my peace with God, at least.’

‘Waste of time,’ declared Alan before standing up. ‘Fancy another?’

‘No,’ answered Maurice. He was tired. He was going home.

The sanatorium was a weird place. Although there were plenty of patients, the Nolans’ section felt empty, like a huge cave divided into smaller sections inside which animals nested silently, each scrap of life curled into its proper niche. Corridors were wide, broad enough to take a tram, while the cells flanking these thoroughfares tended to be small, naked and very white.

Perched loftily on a moor and purpose-built for the sufferers of tuberculosis, the main body of Williamson’s was a large, single-storeyed structure. It was a plain, no-nonsense piece of architecture, soulless, almost sad in its isolation from places built to house mankind’s sounder members.

On arrival, most residents were placed in single rooms while the severity of their ailment was assessed. Jessica had been allowed to stay with her mother, because Jessica had screamed blue murder until permission had been granted. But Mam slept a lot. Jessica, bored almost to tears after a couple of days, took to sneaking along corridors to investigate other occupants of Williamson’s, especially those at
the other end of the building, lucky people with company, jigsaws and newspapers.

Those in solitary confinement tended to be quite poorly, so they weren’t up to much. But others, on the way to recovery, were in larger, four-bedded wards, some with a wireless, some with gramophones and records that could be played from two o’clock until three each afternoon. When music spilled through doorways, it got tangled up like runaway balls of wool in a variety of colours. Vera Lynn competed with Bing Crosby, Richard Tauber tried to fight his tenor-pitched way past Glenn Miller and George Formby.

Jessica liked George Formby. He played something called a ukulele and he seemed to laugh in the middle of his songs. Glenn Miller was just tunes, though the band sometimes shouted out the name of a town and a long number. The men in Room Fourteen of the shared section joined in with the town and the number, and they sounded quite happy and jolly while the music played.

The rest of the time was tedious. Meals were huge. Jessica was expected to put away porridge, bacon, eggs and toast every morning, though she had made an arrangement with some mallards in the grounds. These ducks, gleaming with health and loud of voice, quacked near the Nolans’ iron-railed ground-level balcony at seven-thirty every morning, retreating only after Jessica had deposited half her breakfast on the lawn. Similar tactics were employed at lunch, afternoon tea and supper, with the result that Jessica and the birds became reasonably content with regard to mealtimes.

Theresa was not always forced to eat. She managed a few crumbs from time to time, a mere forkful
of mash and a bit of gravy, but no-one pressed her. Jessica, alert, young and not as ill as most, had to show clean plates after every meal, so her gratitude to the visiting waterfowl knew no bounds.

The room occupied by the Nolans was very tiny, made smaller by Jessica’s bed. Really, Theresa Nolan should have been the sole occupant of Room Two (Single), but Jessica needed to keep a weather eye on Mam. Mam could not be trusted to look after herself, and Jessica placed little faith in nurses. They popped in occasionally, sometimes with food, sometimes in the wake of a doctor with a flapping white coat, red cheeks and a rather jolly Father Christmas-like nose. The men in Room Fourteen (Shared) were always joking about Dr Blake and his fondness for drink, so Jessica decided not to place a lot of faith in him. According to Mam, alcohol was the cause of most of the world’s crimes.