The Four Streets (12 page)

She heard him say, ‘Alice,’ but she still couldn’t look.

He said her name again. ‘Alice, Queen.’ This time she made herself look him straight in the eye with a bold stare.

‘Would ye like another drink?’ he asked, not knowing what else to say. He thought initially her hand on the back of his was to catch his attention above the noise. It was only when he saw the look in her eye that he realized he was wrong. Something else was going on with Alice.

She felt a small self-satisfied warmth with the sense that she had just taken a gigantic step. Emboldened, she radiated a new self-confidence.

The Guinness and Alice’s hand on his were confusing Jerry. He was a sucker for human contact and had missed that a great deal over the last two years. When he looked at Alice, she smiled sweetly. That was hard for Jerry. He was still vulnerable and loved a woman’s company. It was so long since he had had sex, he couldn’t remember what it would be like to have a woman in bed next to him.

Hand on hand… skin on skin… limb on limb.

The thought of moving on from Alice to a future on his own flitted away, as quickly as it had arrived.

He turned over Alice’s hand and laid his strong, brown docker’s palm on top of hers. Her pale white fingers and delicate nails were almost half the size of his. He gently lifted both their hands to face upwards, still joined, palm to palm, as if in prayer, as he stared at them both. Jerry was lost in the moment of fusion. It had been so long.

There was no real beauty in Alice, no vibrancy, no passion. He couldn’t compare her to Bernadette. Chalk and cheese. It was futile to compare any woman to Bernadette; she would fail miserably. After Bernadette, one woman was as good or as bad as another but only one woman was cooking his meals, cleaning his house from time to time and had her hand on his.

The band would play until two in the morning but it was now midnight and, much to Alice’s relief, Jerry stood to leave.

‘Come on, Queen,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’

He had no thought other than that this was a new and strange situation, and he didn’t for one moment want Maura or anyone else for that matter to see him and Alice holding hands. They would want to know what was going on and he had no idea himself. Five minutes ago he had decided it was time to move on from Alice, now here he was holding her hand. How had that happened?

Halfway to the bus stop, Alice slipped her hand into his again and held it.

‘Jerry, can we go back to the house tonight for a drink?’ she whispered. She did her very best to appear seductive although this was so new to her that she had never even been kissed.

Jerry was thrown. They had not done this before. Through the fog of Guinness he tried to recall what time the last bus was and whether she would make it home if they went to his house first. Nellie was sleeping at Maura and Tommy’s where all the children were being looked after by Mrs Keating’s daughter, so he had no reason not to leave the house later and walk her to the bus stop.

‘Sure, but the last bus goes in an hour,’ said Jerry.

She kept her hand in his and turned to walk back towards the house, pulling him round to follow her. There had been no conversation as to what was to happen – there never was much conversation between them – but Jerry didn’t argue with the fact that they were deviating from their normal routine. He was too far gone. It was the Guinness holding Alice’s hand, not Jerry.

She thought she knew what was coming. They would sit down and have a cup of tea and chat about how difficult Jerry was finding things. He would tell her that she had become the centre of his universe and that he couldn’t manage without her, he needed her. That he was beginning to love the times she came round, their walks and occasional evenings out. He would tell her he loved her more than anything in the world. That he admired her cultured ways and wanted to move away from the docks, to make a fresh start together in America or somewhere better than the four streets. Maybe he thought about New York where Alice had always dreamt of living, amongst more ambitious people.

Alice had talked to Jerry about going into insurance and she was sure he was clever enough to get a job at the Royal Liverpool. They had been advertising this week and Jerry had a nice hand for writing. He would tell her he was going to take her advice and apply for jobs, and he would finish his little speech by getting down on one knee and asking her, would she marry him? This was in the world according to Alice. This was her plan.

Alice knew she might have to try to seduce Jerry. This was something she had only ever imagined, but it didn’t matter, she would manage. She had overheard enough conversations amongst chambermaids to know what they got up to and wasn’t she better than any of them? There were ways to avoid getting pregnant and she would use them. She might have to do this thing with Jerry to get him to propose. She had worked hard to get to this point and she wasn’t going to let the time pass any longer. He was an honourable man. Once he had laid with her, he would propose. It couldn’t go wrong and if an Irish slut from the bogs like Bernadette could manage it, then so could she.

Jerry’s ideas were different. He had two bottles of Guinness in his free hand. He thought they would have a drink, and then he would take her for the bus or if they had missed the last one, he would walk with her down towards town to hail a cab. Then he would be up, bright and early, to play the ritual Sunday game of footie with Tommy and the other men and lads on the green, whilst Kitty looked after Nellie. He would then go to Maura’s house for the usual big Sunday roast. Nellie loved nothing more than sitting in Maura’s kitchen, eating her dinner in the company of seven other children. It was the one meal of the week when they pushed the boat out. Jerry always gave Maura money to contribute. He and Tommy earned the same wage. Jerry’s had to keep two people. Tommy’s had to stretch to nine, and it wasn’t easy.

As they went in through the back door, Alice took off her coat. She was wearing a dress that evening that she had bought in town that day. It was cut lower than she would have ever dared wear before and she was self-conscious about the fact that she was displaying too much cleavage. All evening she had wished there was spare material she could pull over her breasts and she regretted not wearing a cardigan. She had spent the entire night trying to draw the neck of the dress closed. She had bought the dress only because she remembered Bernadette’s beautiful figure and how the hotel porters used to comment about it when they thought she was out of earshot.

Whilst Jerry hung up her coat, she took another huge leap. She put her hand inside her dress and lifted each breast up and out to make it more prominent, pushing the material aside to display more cleavage. She took a deep breath. She had no idea what came next but hoped something would give her a clue. She wanted him to look at her breasts, which she had boldly presented, and then kiss her. That must be how it went.

Alice hadn’t been round to the house for a couple of weeks, because she knew Nellie had been sick. Any child was bad enough, but a sick child was intolerable. She realized that while Jerry was trapped in the house with Nellie, Alice was safe and no other papist whore would be getting her nose in. She calculated that to stay away would be a good thing. It would make him see how useful she had been over the last two years and how much her involvement in Jerry’s life made sense.

She was wrong.

She had almost overplayed her hand.

As Jerry switched the lights on, she looked around at the kitchen. The floor was disgustingly dirty. She shuddered. Filthy dishes met her eye, and mouldy remains of dried egg and fat clung to the greasy oilcloth on the table. It looked as if it hadn’t been wiped once in the two weeks since she was last there. Jerry’s and Nellie’s dirty clothes were piled up on the corner of the kitchen floor, not even in a basket or a box. Jerry had spent all day washing the sheets and hadn’t got round to the clothes.

A white enamel bucket of cold, pungent, dark-brown water sat under the sink, full of Nellie’s soaking dirty nappies. In the dim light from the overhead bulb, the indoor washing line had been pulled out across the top of the range, on which were pegged the few nappies Jerry had managed to wash out that day, now filling the room with steam. Its smell, and that of the enamel nappy bucket, mingled with that of Jerry’s sweat-soaked work clothes and made Alice’s stomach heave. She just about hid her revulsion.

Pull yourself together, you are nearly there, she told herself, as she forced another smile and looked Jerry straight in the eye. She wanted to leave the service of the hotel and begin planning a new life with the man she hadn’t stopped thinking about since the day she first saw him. Having seen him treat another woman and even his repulsive child with so much kindness, she was determined to have him for herself.

Jerry opened the bottles and drank deeply from one. He looked at Alice as, without a word, he handed her hers. Alice took it from him before picking up his free hand and placing it on her breast. Jerry was stunned. Repelled. No. He didn’t want this at all.

He could feel that Alice was shaking, as abruptly she moved his hand down and onto her abdomen and then slid it between her legs. This is what she had seen the girls do at the back gate with the men who walked them home to the back of the hotel. They didn’t know Alice watched them every night. She had seen them put their hands down men’s trousers and undo the buttons as they got down onto their knees, or sometimes if the men were in a hurry they raised the girls’ skirts and almost lifted them off the floor as they pinned them against the wall and took them quickly.

They always reminded Alice of animals. Of the roaming dogs she had watched in the street when she was a girl. She had seen neighbours run out with buckets of cold water to throw over those that were locked together, howling and snapping, stuck in mid-copulation. She had only to step away from the window to remove herself but she never did. She had watched every chambermaid who had been taken at the back gate since Bernadette had left. Voyeurism had been Alice’s life.

In those few seconds, whilst she moved Jerry’s hand between her legs, a switch flicked on in Jerry that had been shut down for a long time. Suddenly, in the passing of a single second, he knew what he was about to do. He pulled away from her abruptly and staggered from the door with his back to the range. He stood looking at this plain, skinny woman, whom he didn’t really know. Was this really about to happen?

He realized he had no idea how this situation had come about. He was deviating from his path of strict emotional control, a path he had walked in a steady line for two years. Now that he had stepped off he was beyond help. At that moment, his love for Bernadette turned to hatred. His anger at her leaving him bubbled to the surface for the first time since she had died.

He had drunk too much to control his fury. He felt hatred for God, the world, the priests, his neighbours who pitied him, for his parents for being elderly, for the life he had inherited and for the impossible job of being a father. He felt hatred for this scheming devil woman who was not the shy and proper Alice he knew. He hated himself. He hated everyone and everything and he was about to explode with anger.

‘Come here,’ he said roughly as he moved away from the range and towards her.

Alice stood frozen to the spot. If she did move towards him, she didn’t know what to do.

‘Come here,’ he said again, only louder, with impatience and irritation.

For a second this shocked Alice, terrifying her into silence. This was the opposite of kindness, this was not what she had planned. This was not the fumbling she had seen at the back gate of the hotel. She was rooted to the spot, as he took the few remaining steps to stand in front of her. Without even kissing or touching her, he roughly pulled her dress up to her waist and her panties down over her suspenders and stockings. He took the bottle out of her hand, and placed it on the draining board. Jerry was an Irishman. He might have been about to have sex for the first time in almost two years, he might have been angry and have lost all reason, but he wasn’t going to spill the Guinness.

Afterwards there were very few things Jerry remembered about that night. It would take too much time to go through the niceties and get Alice to bed, so he took her over the kitchen table.

He couldn’t make love to her and look at her face at the same time, and so he turned her over. He could do this only if he couldn’t see her eyes. He couldn’t kiss her. Kissing her was the last thing he wanted to do. He wanted only sex, not affection. He wanted to punish her, badly. He remembered holding the back of her hair and accidentally pressing her face into the table without meaning to. His instincts were basic and animalistic, and if Alice hadn’t deliberately engineered this, his lovemaking would have bordered on rape.

Making love to Bernadette had been nothing like this but that was what he wanted right now. No affection, no loving conversation, no kissing, no laughter. He wanted nothing to be like it was with him and Bernadette. Nothing. His anger with Bernadette for leaving him with a child and his intense hatred for life spilt out of him and into Alice as he pounded and punished her. And she didn’t make a sound.

So angry was he and so consumed with loathing, he didn’t notice the tears he cried all the way through. He didn’t hear his own sobs.

She was relieved when he finished, staggered backwards against the range and picked up his bottle again.

‘Oh God, for feck’s sake,’ he said, as he wiped his mouth with his hand.

Was that a good thing for him to say, she wondered? Did that mean he enjoyed it? She had never imagined she would lose her virginity, ever. But when she had, she had not imagined it would be like this. She was horrified and in shock, but she was tough. She was repelled by the surroundings and the smell, by the fact that nothing tonight seemed to be going to her plan. She knew what she was aiming for and if this was how to get there, so be it. She saw the tears pouring down his face, but pretended she hadn’t.

Alice felt physically sick. She felt worthless and abused. She had thought that Jerry would at least kiss her the way she had seen him kiss Bernadette, night after night, from her bedroom window. That her first time would be less brutal than this. Tears pricked at the back of her own eyes and she willed them to stay where they were. If this was what she had to do to get his ring on her finger, she would go through it in silence. If it took her one step away from her single room in a hotel attic, if she had to endure this night, she would do it.