The Four Streets (13 page)

Pushing down on the table with her hands, she levered herself up from where he had left her. Her dress was around her waist and she frantically pushed it back down.

She turned round and looked at him. So acute was her embarrassment that it was one of the hardest things she had ever done in her life. He wouldn’t meet her gaze, as he wiped his tears away with the back of his hand. Not looking at her was, in a way, a relief as he drank from the bottle.

‘Get undressed, Alice,’ he said as he undid his belt. ‘Get all your clothes off now.’

For a second, with horror, she thought he was going to beat her with the belt but realized it was to further loosen his trousers. She had walked into enough hotel bedrooms and seen enough men naked not to be shocked, but she knew he would never have spoken to Bernadette in that way. Alice was jealous of a ghost.

‘Get on your hands and knees on the floor,’ Jerry said and Alice didn’t recognize his voice. It was guttural and thick from the tears choking his throat.

She shook like a leaf and felt humiliated as, naked and cold, she obeyed awkwardly. Her face was feet away from the stinking pile of washing. Stale remnants of breadcrumbs and food dug into her palms and knees, stabbing into her skin like sharp tiny pins. As he pounded her repeatedly, this time for much longer, it took all her strength to keep her arms rigid to support herself. The buckle from his belt pierced the skin on the back of her thigh almost causing her to scream out in pain. She could not withstand his weight and when he finally came, her arms collapsed and her entire body crashed forward onto the floor with Jerry laid fully across her back. A virgin no more. She was at one with cold, dirty concrete. Her face was pressed downwards and she smelt urine where, earlier in the day, Nellie had had an accident while she toddled around.

‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’ Jerry sobbed and sobbed and, for the second time that night, Alice did not know what to do.

She lay perfectly still and waited for the sobbing to subside. What had she done wrong?

When Jerry finally stood up, he staggered up the stairs to his bed, saying nothing to Alice. She heard him crying, so loudly and painfully that she knew the emotion locked her out of the room. She gathered herself together, snatched up her clothes, holding them tightly in front of her, and collapsed onto the small sofa against the wall. She was scared he would come back down the stairs and demand more, but after half an hour or so, she heard the sobbing subside and knew he had fallen asleep.

Even though she hated the stuff, Alice went over to the Guinness and gulped the rest to calm her nerves and, even though she didn’t smoke, she lit one of Jerry’s cigarettes. She was in shock. But that was all. It was done now. She was no longer a virgin.

There was now something she knew she had to do. She took out of her bag the potion she had bought at the chemist’s and put the kettle on the kitchen range. She might have got what she wanted, but she wasn’t going to get more than she had asked for.

Of the two of them, only Jerry knew that there were sailors taking whores up against the dock walls with more feeling than he had felt before or after sex, with Alice in his own home. Alice had no idea that what had just taken place had nothing to do with her. That she could have been anyone.

Now she was occupying the bed he had shared with Bernadette. He had woken up in the middle of the night and become aware Alice was there, lying next to him but as far away as she could be. He felt worse with Alice in his bed than if he had been alone.

When he had been on his own, he would place his hand flat onto the mattress and slowly pass it over the bed. It didn’t always happen, but sometimes it would stop as it came up against her form. He would close his eyes and, as he breathed deeply, he would move his arm up and onto the milky-soft skin of her abdomen, which he knew as well as his own. He would run his hand up and across her breasts, over her face and into her wild hair. In the moonlight streaming in through the window he would see her eyes twinkle at him. And, just like that, he would lie and talk to her about Nellie and work, Maura and Tommy, and would fall asleep with her breath on his hand.

He knew now that would never happen again. He had never talked to Bernadette about Alice and here Alice was, lying in her place.

At first light, Alice slipped out to the outhouse to clean herself up. The sticky mess, which had spread across her thighs, had made her legs itch all night. She couldn’t get it off her skin quickly enough as she scrubbed and scrubbed until her legs were red raw.

Whilst Jerry still slept, she cleaned the kitchen and put the nappies into the boiler. When he came down the stairs, smelt the frying bacon and potatoes and saw the clean kitchen, he was grateful. He knew what had happened the night before and he knew his duty.

He was ashamed. He knew he had behaved like an animal. Catholic guilt swamped him. His emotions had been primeval. It hadn’t mattered that it was Alice, who had been good to him. He felt as though he had been possessed by something bad and vowed to himself that, as long as he lived, he would never behave like that again.

The previous night had been a passage back into the real world. He had vented his anger, which had bordered on loathing, at his Bernadette. His anger and venom extended to the hospital, the midwife and everyone else he had blamed for her death and for leaving him with the life he now had. He had been consumed by an evil rage that had been locked deep down inside him since the moment Bernadette had died and last night it had erupted with a Vesuvian ferocity.

He had taken it out on Alice. He had abused her. He had punished Alice for things that had nothing to do with her. Jerry had heard men talking at the docks who had treated a whore better than he had treated Alice last night. As he woke his first thought had been, Oh God, what have I done?

He was worried about facing Alice, but that was secondary to the realization that he knew what he had to do and what his responsibility now was.

‘Morning, Queen,’ he said nervously, as he came downstairs.

As he looked at the clean kitchen, it occurred to him that it really didn’t matter who took the role of a wife and a mother in his house. He didn’t love Alice but he needed routine and order back in his life, and this woman could give him that. He needed someone to share rearing Nellie with him. The women were right. It was near impossible for a man to bring up a daughter on his own. It wasn’t the proper thing to do. He owed it to Nellie to find her a mother.

Before he sat at the table she had scrubbed, the table on which she had lost her virginity, he walked over to the range where she was leaning over the pan, frying his breakfast.

‘Alice, will ye marry me?’

He said it too quickly. It was too complete a statement; he left no room for ambiguity. The hangover from the Guinness blended with Catholic guilt and a misplaced sense of duty. Prompted by loneliness and despair, he had proposed to a woman who was as far from Bernadette as it was possible to be.

Alice smiled. She had got there. Not in the way she had thought, but she had achieved her goal. Neither of them had wanted emotional contact; only one had wanted sex, as a means to an end; and she had got there. Just as she had surmised, he felt duty bound, out of decency and honour, to propose once he had slept with her.

Now she had to leave the house quickly, before any of the neighbours realized she had spent the night. If they saw her leave, they would also know the truth: that Alice had won.

She sat on the bus back to the Grand, looking out of the window. The seats were made of green leather and the windows were so dirty she could barely see outside. She rubbed the condensation from the inside window with her gloved hand and stared through the circle she had made at the passing houses, at smoke billowing out of chimneys, at the warehouses, pump rooms and workshops.

She was sore. Walking to the bus stop had been painful. She felt as though the back and inside of her thighs were bruised. When she had gone to the outhouse, her urine had stung, and her scalp hurt, where Jerry had pulled her hair. She felt as though every breath she had taken since last night had been a shallow one.

She was tense and confused but, as always, acting and hiding it well. When she closed her eyes, she could see and smell the hard dried egg and grease on the kitchen table into which Jerry had pushed her face, as he had forced his way into her. But it was over now. She was betrothed. It had all been worth it. And here she was, thirty- two, smelling of sex and had still never been kissed.

Jerry and Alice married less than a month later. Alice wore a very expensive outfit that had fortuitously been left hanging in one of the hotel rooms by a guest travelling on to America. It fitted Alice’s short and skinny frame well. The label said Moda Paris, London and New York. Alice had read the label over and over again, when she realized the outfit was going to remain unclaimed. This was now hers. Her wedding outfit.

‘How many women from the docks have married in anything as grand as this,’ she said to the head porter, who was disappointed that Alice was keeping the outfit. As Alice was head housekeeper, all unclaimed property was hers to do with as she wished. As head porter, he would have become the beneficiary of anything Alice didn’t want for herself.

The wedding was to be held in the register office and Alice had decided that Jerry needed a suit, something there wasn’t much call for on the docks. Jerry was puzzled by this and his first inclination was to pay a visit to Eric Berry, the pawnbroker’s. Not only had he never owned a suit, he didn’t know anyone else who had one either. On the day he had married Bernadette, he had worn one of his uncle’s, which his auntie had kept in the wardrobe since the day her husband had died. It had originally been bought in from Berry’s shop for his uncle’s own wedding, which Jerry remembered attending as a child. Since the day Jerry had married Bernadette, it had hung in the same wardrobe as always, with a calico cloth draped over it to protect it from the moths and dust.

When he brought the suit downstairs to show her, Jerry found Alice’s indignation hard to understand. Was it because he had worn it when he had married Bernadette? He couldn’t have been less bothered about that; for all he cared, a suit was a suit. He hadn’t enjoyed wearing it on the day he had married Bernadette and he was sure it would be equally uncomfortable this time around. Jerry had no emotional attachment whatsoever to a suit, which rubbed his neck and made him feel as though he had a wooden coat-hanger stuck down his back. One reason for dragging Bernadette away from their wedding so quickly hadn’t just been about ripping her clothes off as fast as possible; it had been about getting out of his own too. His suit hadn’t made it as far as the bedroom and he remembered it had been strewn on the stairs along with Bernadette’s dress.

‘That suit can go on the rag and bone man’s cart in the morning,’ said Alice, her nose and lips visibly turned upwards, ‘and we will go into town, when you finish work, to have you measured for a new one.’

Jerry was in shock; this took some digesting.

‘I know exactly where to go,’ continued Alice. ‘Some of the guests who stayed at the hotel often needed to have a suit run up quickly. The concierge knows a Jewish tailor on Bold Street who would run one up in forty-eight hours. I will get a good price for it too.’

She didn’t even look at him for his approval. As far as Alice was concerned, she had spoken. It was done. Jerry’s expression was the same as if he had been told the following afternoon’s football match had been cancelled.

‘I don’t have the money for new suits, Alice,’ he replied very quietly and firmly.

An extravagance like that was not in his scheme of things. Jerry liked to live within his means. He saved half a crown every week and always had, but that money wasn’t for him, or to be thrown away on suits. Even in the weeks he never quite made half a crown, he always managed to put something by.

Alice had found a new confidence since losing her virginity and receiving a marriage proposal, a confidence that was not to be challenged. ‘I have some money saved, Jerry, and we will use it to buy the suit,’ she said with an air of finality. ‘I won’t be embarrassed by either of us not dressing for the occasion.’

Was Alice, a woman, proposing to buy him a suit? Jerry was bombarded by a new set of uncomfortable emotions that he had never before experienced. He felt torn between wanting to keep Alice happy and being affronted at her telling him what to do. He and Bernadette had never operated like that. Throughout their daily lives, every decision had been taken by mutual agreement. Or so Jerry had thought. For the last couple of years, he had made every decision alone. Some had been challenging and far more difficult than others but he had grown used to that.

He looked at Alice and silently, almost submissively, nodded. This was all very new and for now, he decided to avoid a scene. Alice smiled briefly as she folded up the old suit and laid the bundle by the back door, ready to be thrown to the rag and bone man when he came down the entry the following morning. As she flung the suit down, she shuddered and walked over to the sink to wash her hands.

Jerry looked at the garment he had never before much liked. He now wanted to grab it off the floor and smell it. He wanted to hold it to his face and breathe in deeply the happiness of weddings past. Instead he lit a cigarette. Five minutes ago he hadn’t given a fig for the suit; now he was fighting to overcome an almost overwhelming desire to rescue it from the rag and bone man and tell Alice it was this suit or none. Deceitful notions were dancing in his brain: of pretending he had thrown it out and hiding it in Tommy’s house. Jerry dragged deeply on his cigarette. These new feelings were confusing and he had no idea what to do with them.

‘Jeez, I’m just a bloke, what do I know,’ he said as he shrugged his shoulders. He had given in. Alice had shifted herself into position.

He wore the new suit for the first time on the morning he and Alice were married. He had never felt more uncomfortable in his life.