The Corner House (32 page)

‘Hello.’

Eva brought herself back into the present, saw Theresa dropping a kiss onto Jessica’s head. ‘Eeh, you made me jump,’ the older woman declared.

Theresa sat down next to her daughter. Jessica was so, so beautiful, with good, strong bones, lovely colouring, gorgeous hair. She would grow up soon. The idea of men taking an interest in Jessica made Theresa catch her breath. She covered the gasp by prattling on. ‘I’ve bought you some clothes. A skirt
and two blouses. They’re behind the counter being looked after till we leave.’

Jessica managed a grim smile. Thank you,’ she mumbled.

Eva watched them. The girl was very much alive, healthy, glowing. The mother remained structurally pretty, but make-up did not cover the greyish pallor, the small pockets of skin where flesh had melted away. Panic fluttered its wings in Eva’s breast. When Theresa died, who would take care of Jessica? Would blood relatives claim her, take her away from Eva and Jimmy?

Theresa felt the atmosphere acutely. She glanced from Eva to Jessica, back to Eva. Hoping that the situation would improve in her absence, Theresa went up to the counter to order biscuits and more drinks.

‘She’s got to come for Christmas,’ said Jessica, her voice loud enough to reach every ear in the shop.

Eva sniffed wisely. ‘Your mam has to work.’

‘All year? All three hundred and sixty-five days? No holidays, no time off?’

Eva understood. Jessica was standing on the outer rim of childhood, preparing to leap into life. She knew too much, understood too little. ‘Don’t go upsetting your mam,’ she warned.

The girl shrugged carelessly. She was fed up with having no mother. Most of the girls at school had two parents, but Jessica was stuck with a foster family and no real roots. Strangely, she never mentioned a father. Sensing a great hurt in Theresa, Jessica had decided not to ask questions about her sire just yet. To have a full-time mother would have sufficed.

Jessica watched her mother. She was small and frail, she appeared to have shrunk more rapidly than
usual. Had she been able to read minds, Jessica would have realized that she and Auntie Eva were entertaining very similar thoughts. If Mam died, would Jessica remain with Eva, or would she finish up with Auntie Ruth? God forbid.

‘All right, pet?’ asked Eva.

Jessica shifted in her chair. Everyone knew that Auntie Ruth had made Irene bad. Irene was like a witch, an evil person who preyed on the weak and the hurt.

‘Jess?’

The girl swallowed painfully. Mam looked so weary. ‘Yes,’ she told Eva softly. ‘Yes, I’m all right.’

Theresa returned. ‘The waitress is bringing tea and cakes,’ she said. ‘And we are going to have two Christmases this year.’

Jessica, suddenly happier, grinned broadly. ‘Two?’

Theresa nodded. ‘When it’s really Christmas, I shall have to be in Liverpool. You see, Jess, I look after people who were in the war. Sailors from the navy, other sailors who brought food into the docks.’ She patted her daughter’s arm. ‘Some of them were hurt. Many can’t look after themselves.’

Jessica frowned. ‘Why didn’t you tell us about your job before?’

Theresa rooted round for an answer. ‘I’m all over the place, love. I even live in a sort of hotel filled with poor old men. You see, I was afraid that you’d want to visit me or live with me, and you can’t. There’s too much illness.’

Eva listened hard and decided that Theresa was speaking some of the truth. ‘Two Christmases?’ she enquired.

Theresa nodded. ‘I’ll come over for a few days. I’ll buy a big chicken and some crackers. We’ll have a
grand time.’ The thought of visiting Bolton made her heart beat erratically. But she would go. She would go with Maria Martin, if necessary, would make sure that Maria carried out her unsavoury mission.

‘When?’ asked Jessica.

‘Next week, I think. Just expect me when you see me.’ She had taken very little time off; even when ill, Theresa had struggled and gasped her way through endless hours and days. The committee owed her something, she judged. And Maggie was easily capable of keeping the place ticking over. ‘There you are, Jessica.’ She passed a chocolate biscuit to her daughter.

Jessica laughed. What more could she ask? Two digestives, a new skirt and Mam coming home? Jessica’s cup was suddenly filled to the brim. The vessel was not running over, not yet. But this was the first step. Perhaps Mam would return to Bolton for ever in the near future. Tasting a mixture of hope and chocolate, Jessica was content. Almost.

Teddy Betteridge stared gloomily into his pint of ale. He was fed up to the back teeth, wisdoms included. It was all right for his two companions. They weren’t married and stuck with a couple of kids. And the kids were a bloody picnic compared to the flaming wife. Bugger Elsie, he cursed inwardly. He took a swig, then slammed the glass down.

‘How’s your dad?’ asked Roy Chorlton. He had resigned himself to spending Saturday nights in the company of these two cretins. With his pale skin, bulbous eyes and thinning hair, Roy was not popular with members of either sex. Nobody gave a tuppenny damn about him. Ged and Teddy tolerated him because he bought his share of drinks and, anyway, they had got used to his appearance over the years.

‘Still as daft as a brush,’ Teddy replied. ‘He was a strait-jacket job up to last Tuesday, thought he had a plague of giant red ants crawling all over him. That’s what drink’s done to him, I suppose.’ He downed half a pint in one swallow.

Ged Hardman shook his head gravely. ‘You want to watch yourself,’ he advised Betteridge. ‘Or you’ll be joining him in the next padded cell.’

Teddy bridled slightly. Who the hell did Ged
Hardman think he was? ‘I know what I’m doing,’ he replied smartly, swallowing a remark about clever folk who picked their spots and ended up full of holes. He knew what he was doing, all right. He was drinking himself into oblivion so that he wouldn’t notice his pathetic little life. What did he have? A load of responsibility, that was all. An ironmongery stall, a wife who looked like a brewer’s nag, and two kids with voices loud enough to strip paint off the doors.

Ged, who was easily as unhappy as Teddy, drummed his fingertips on the table. His legendary mother, Lily Hardman, was a demanding, selfish harridan. Although she still doted on her son, Lily kept him dangling, made him wait for every few bob, rendered him childlike and dependent. ‘I feel like …’ Ged’s words trailed away.

‘Like what?’ asked Roy.

‘Like hell.’

Roy understood. Roy had a theory, an idea that he had entertained for some years. Having come to suspect the existence of God, the man both feared and accepted the concept of retribution. His soul was tortured, mostly during the hours of darkness, because dreams were beyond his control, while wakefulness was scarcely bearable. Almost every night, he saw her, heard her whimpering, felt her soft flesh beneath his hands. He swallowed painfully. ‘We’re probably getting what we deserve.’

Ged Hardman threw up his hands. ‘Don’t start all that again, Roy,’ he warned. ‘Or I’ll take you outside and change your appearance.’

Roy shrugged. ‘Please yourself,’ he invited.

Teddy Betteridge looked from one to the other. ‘You can shut up and all,’ he advised Ged Hardman.
Glaring at Roy, he lowered his tone. ‘If you want to carry on being some kind of a martyr, bugger off and do it somewhere else.’

Roy raised a shoulder. ‘Don’t you ever wonder what happened to her?’

‘Only when you start whining,’ snapped Teddy. ‘I wouldn’t care – you were the one who moaned when me and Ged talked about her just before the war.’

‘She could be dead,’ murmured Roy.

‘We could all be bloody dead,’ replied Teddy, impatience narrowing the syllables. ‘We fought for King and country, didn’t we? So be a hero and leave the past where it belongs.’

‘And the child …’ Roy took a sip of bitter.

‘Look.’ Ged leaned forward, allowing his companions a closer view of facial skin textured like crumpets before toasting, sickly-white and covered in craters. ‘I’m not saying we did the right thing. What we did that night was wrong. But life has to go on.’

‘There’s not one of us happy,’ stated Roy flatly.

‘That’s nowt to do with owt,’ barked Teddy. ‘And we agreed about forty-seven times to stop talking about this.’

Roy sighed inwardly. He sometimes drew a strange comfort from Betteridge and Hardman, because they were the only humans on God’s earth who might just understand the nature of his mental torture. Yet they were little help, he acknowledged. Ged laboured under his mother’s thumb, while Teddy drank himself into a stupor just so that he could face his wife. ‘I’ve no-one else to talk to,’ Roy said now.

Ged and Teddy rose simultaneously from the table. Roy was in one of his moods again. They were sick of telling him to let go, to get on with his life, but
the man seemed bent on his own peculiar brand of self-destruction. Without speaking another word, they left to take their custom across the road to the Hen and Chickens.

Roy watched his two so-called friends as they sauntered out onto the pavement. Although Teddy Betteridge and Ged Hardman seemed not to care, Roy knew that both had changed after the rape. Life had provided few distractions for Roy Chorlton. While Ged and his mother had fought to preserve Hardman’s Hides, while Teddy had struggled with an alcoholic father and an unhappy wife, Roy had ‘fallen on his feet’. After all, hadn’t Maurice Chorlton left a small fortune for his son? Even after the disgrace of dealing with police and stolen property, Roy had emerged with a fair packet of money. If only he hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and several precious gems in the safe, he might have found something to do, some activity that might have taken his mind off Theresa Nolan and her child.

Yes, it had all been too easy. With one hand, Roy had closed a jewellery shop; with the other hand, he had opened a tailoring business catering to the better end of the clothing market, a small empire from which he took little real pleasure. Behind the selling area, men and women laboured with scissors, chalk, machines and half-clothed dummies, while Roy, alone in his shop, courted customers with an air of benevolence that might have suited a Uriah Heep. He disgusted himself.

He had never expected to develop a conscience of such gigantic proportions. Surely, these thoughts and memories should have diminished after all the intervening years? She was always inside his
head, usually slightly hidden behind other thoughts, often gliding noiselessly through the mist to accuse him, curse him.

Suddenly, he was aware of eyes boring into his skull from the outside rather than from within his brain. As if feeling pain, he brushed a hand across his forehead before looking up. It was Eva Harris, now Mrs Coates. Her husband accompanied her, and he, too, was staring at Roy.

They walked to his table as few seats were available now, most having been occupied by the newly released patrons of several town cinemas.

Eva sat down while her husband went to the bar.

Roy’s breath quickened and thickened. A tightness at his throat caused a short bout of coughing.

Eva took a compact from her bag and powdered her nose. ‘Nice to see you, Mr Chorlton,’ she said, though her tone belied the message. She replaced the compact in the depths of her capacious bag. ‘Jimmy knows who you are, I think,’ she continued, her eyes straying to the crowded bar. ‘We’ve been to the pictures. Some daft cowboy thing with John Wayne in a big hat.’

He gulped, mopped his brow with a handkerchief. ‘How is she?’ he managed eventually.

‘Theresa?’

He nodded.

‘Oh, fair to middling, I suppose.’

Roy Chorlton gripped the edge of the table. ‘Where is she?’

Eva shrugged. ‘No idea,’ she lied easily.

‘The child?’

‘Still with me.’

He shifted in his chair. ‘Will … er … Theresa be coming back?’

Eva turned down the corners of her mouth, shrugged. ‘How would I know the answer to that?’

‘Surely she keeps in touch with you,’ he answered. ‘After all, there’s the little girl to consider.’

Eva leaned her head to one side. ‘You talking about duty?’ she asked. ‘About folk owing stuff to other folk?’ Her teeth bared themselves in a mockery of a grin. ‘Listen, sunshine,’ she spat. ‘Wherever she is, she’s got a good job and she sends money for Jess— for her daughter. Apart from that bit left by George Hardman before he scarpered, there’s been nowt from any of you. Not that she wants anything, mind. She says she needs no help and you’ve to stop away from the kiddy.’ She paused for a couple of seconds. ‘You’re likely the father – is that it? Is that why you’ve took an interest all of a sudden? Do you want to groom the lass to make buttonholes for you?’

‘No.’

‘Then what’s the matter with you?’

He didn’t know the complete answer, though he had his theories.

‘Conscience let itself out for an airing, has it?’

He held her gaze before nodding just once. ‘It’s always troubled me,’ he admitted.

She laughed mirthlessly. ‘You’ve got no blinking conscience, you and them other two buggers. If you’d any decency, what happened wouldn’t have happened and Theresa would have been all right. You make me sick.’

‘I make myself sick,’ he replied softly.

Eva studied him. Like his dad, he was greasy, soft and plump. Like his dad, he was going to be bald on top. His eyes were convex and heavy-lidded, while the hands were smooth enough to belong to a
female member of the aristocracy. ‘You’re … sorry?’ she asked, astonishment lifting her tone.

He lowered his head. ‘I’ve always been sorry.’ He licked drying lips, wished for more beer to slake a fierce thirst. ‘When I asked her to marry me, I suppose I was being a bit arrogant, as if she should have been grateful.’ He let out a long, hopeless sigh. ‘But who would look at me? I know I’m ugly. I know what you see when you look at me. She was so beautiful, so frail—’

‘She’s still frail.’ Eva didn’t feel sorry for the man, even though he plainly regretted his actions.

‘So you do know where she is?’

Eva paused before answering. ‘Aye, I’ve a fair idea, only I’m bound to secrecy.’ She leaned across the table. ‘She’s told nobody where she works – even her daughter.’