The Mersey Girls (9 page)

‘Sorry, Grandad; I’ll stop chattering now, I promise.’

‘You’d better, or you’ll find yourself weedin’ the vegetable garden tomorrow afternoon instead of jauntin’ off wit’ young Caitlin.’

‘I like weeding,’ Lucy said. ‘I’ll do some tomorrow evening, so I will.’ She read for a while in silence, then closed her book. ‘I’m off to bed now; goodnight, Maeve me love, goodnight Grandad.’

Her grandfather grunted and Maeve glanced up at the clock above the mantel. ‘You’ll be wanting to holler to Caitlin I suppose,’ she said drily. ‘Well, try not to crack all the eggs before the hens have laid ’em.’

‘I’ll try,’ Lucy said blithely. ‘Can I take a candle?’

‘God have patience, it’s as light as midday so it is,’ her grandfather exploded, putting down his paper. ‘Why the candle?’

‘Because if Maeve doesn’t want me to holler then I could signal to Caitlin if I had a candle and a bit of cardboard . . .’

‘Dear God, will you go to bed and stop your chatterin’?’ her grandfather said. ‘Oh go on, go on, take a candle, pauperise me before me time, don’t you worry about your poor grandad’s purse, always more where that came from . . .’

‘Thanks, Grandad,’ said the unrepentant Lucy, kissing his head as she passed him. ‘See you in the morning!’

But later, in her own bed, Lucy fell to wondering once more about the cake.
Someone
had taken it, either an animal or a person, and there weren’t many animals, in Lucy’s experience, which could extract cake from a person’s bag, and devour it without leaving so much as a crumb.

Unless it was a rat? Rats are cunning, and ingenious with their paws and teeth . . . I suppose it must have been a rat, Lucy concluded, and began to drift towards sleep, but in her heart, she was not convinced. Someone had taken the cake, someone had moved the curragh . . . but it had been a long day. Soon, she slept.

Maeve sat on for a while, finishing her row, then she rolled up her work and put it up on the mantelpiece and yawned.

‘Want a cup of cocoa before you go to bed, Father?’

‘Might as well. Got any soda bread?’

‘I’ll butter you a piece.’

Maeve went through to the kitchen, reflecting how Lucy had mellowed her grandfather these past few years. He had begun by resenting the child and had ended up doting on her – not that he would ever admit it, mind. It was strange, really, that he seemed only able to love one person at a time, unlike the rest of humanity, who had affection and to spare. First, years ago, it had been his wife, then his daughter Evie. When Evie had gone Nora had become his favourite and reigned supreme for a couple of years . . . but gradually, even before Nora’s marriage, Lucy’s star had begun to be in the ascendant and by the time Nora left her father had scarcely missed her at all.

‘Time they were gone,’ he had said gruffly to Maeve. ‘The three of us will do very nicely, very nicely.’

He still doesn’t love me, Maeve told herself now, bustling round the kitchen and making the cocoa, buttering the soda bread. But he tolerates me much better than he did – and he dotes on Lucy, so he does. And he’s a good farmer, very much better than most in these parts, so whatever he may say the money’s there to keep the child in comfort when he’s gone.

And there was Evie. Not that they heard from her much, especially lately. But she sent money regularly, and Maeve put it all away in the post office so that Lucy would have something of her own one day.

Maeve wrote, though always to a theatre or a post restante address since Evie assured her sister she was always moving around. Maeve asked about the other baby, Lucy’s twin sister, in every letter, but apart from saying that Linnet was well, growing out of her clothes and eating her out of house and home, Evie never really gave details.

Still, if Evie was really doing well, and it seemed that she was, then it surely could be only a matter of time before she came back for a visit? England isn’t the ends of the earth, Maeve told herself sometimes. It was more than twelve years since Evie had left Ireland, so wasn’t it about time that she came back, if only for a visit? And how lovely it would be for Lucy and Linnet to meet! Lucy knew all about her sister, of course, but had long ago stopped asking about her. She was more bound up with Caitlin and her life on the farm than with a mother who had abandoned her at four months old and a sister she had never seen. It was all right for Maeve, because she only had to close her eyes to see Linnet, who would be the spitting image of Lucy, only a bit bigger since she had been the stronger, stouter baby. But because she had not liked to tell Lucy that she had a double, she had never mentioned the likeness, nor even the fact that they were twins. Lucy had somehow got the impression that Linnet was older than she, which was why Evie had taken her sister and left Lucy, and Maeve thought it was better that way. To explain why a mother would abandon one twin and take the other was too complex for Maeve, and besides such an explanation might not show Evie in a good light, and Maeve loved Evie still and always thought and spoke of her with affection.

Maeve had a vague idea that Lucy might sometimes hear her mother talked of – possibly even slightingly – by other children whose parents were in no doubt that Evie Murphy had been no better than she should be, but she continued to believe that Lucy regarded her absent mother with fondness and her sister with interest. In fact, though, it was far simpler than that. Lucy simply never thought of her mother or sister at all.

When Linnet was thirteen, she was asked to make a big decision: to go or to stay? She came home from school on a bright but windy October day to find Mammy in a state, sitting on the green silk sofa she was so proud of and weeping buckets into a small, lace-edged hanky.

‘What’s the matter, Mammy? Are you ill?’ she had asked, very dismayed at this sudden change of tack, for her mother had been on top of the world for the best part of a week, singing around the flat, taking Linnet out for fish and chip dinners, buying herself pretty hats and elegant shoes.

Her mother looked up. Her face was quite swollen with tears and her eyes were red-rimmed from weeping. ‘Oh, Linnet, my little darling, the most distressing thing! Th-they don’t want me to take you with me when I go off in a month’s time!’

Mammy had been touring several times, ever since Linnet was eight, in fact. ‘You can take care of yourself, a big girl of eight,’ Mammy had said persuasively, and though at first Linnet hadn’t liked it much she had soon grown accustomed. It wasn’t nearly as hard as it sounded since Mrs Roberts in the flat downstairs had Linnet in for her tea each day and saw to her washing and came up and did any big housework that Linnet could not tackle. And later Mrs Sullivan, Roddy’s mam, had been equally eager to help out – for a price, of course. So Roddy and Linnet had roamed the city to their hearts’ content all through the long summer holidays and Linnet had helped Roddy to sell wood-chips, to run errands, to hang round the people coming off the ships at the docks, offering to carry their cases for tuppence and, alas, to prig vegetables from St Martin’s market when Mrs Sullivan fancied blind scouse but had somehow run out of money.

So what was different this time? Linnet said as much, taking the sopping wet hanky from her mother’s hands and replacing it with a dry one.

‘This time it-it’s further, and for 1-1-longer,’ her mother had wailed. ‘This time it’s Am-Am-America, alanna. And it’s my b-big chance!’

‘Then you must go,’ Linnet said stoutly, though her heart failed her a little. America! That was a long way off, further even than the Glasgow Empire, she believed, where Mammy had played to packed houses only a few short months ago. ‘It’s your career, after all,’ she added. ‘Your whole future, Mammy!’

She was well-trained; she had said the words a dozen times before, but had never meant them less, because she would have been a fool had she not realised that Mr Terence Beatty, her mother’s latest impresario, did not like her, resented her in fact.

Other impresarios had come and gone, and there had been one or two who found her a nuisance, but never had there been one who showed it more constantly than Terence Beatty. He wasn’t elderly, for a start, which she thought a great shame; elderly admirers were usually very generous, both to the object of their admiration and to her small daughter. Younger men, though they might lavish gifts on little Evie, were more inclined to give Linnet a sixpence and tell her to go and see a film-show and then grumble when she came home.

The odd thing was that Terence was beautiful by anyone’s standards. He had richly curling black hair, dark, flashing eyes and a mobile mouth which smiled easily and often. Women adored him, and Linnet had been totally taken in by his beauty and willing to fall at his feet, but he had not wanted her. From the outset he had made it clear that Linnet was nothing but a nuisance, though he had fallen head over heels in love with little Evie the very first time he had seen her on stage.

‘In the raw?’ Roddy asked with interest when Linnet told him this tale, and got a clip round the ear for his pains. Linnet might occasionally dislike an impresario – she very soon hated Terence – but she was too loyal to her mother to let it show. Roddy, as her dearest friend, was allowed a good deal of licence, but he should know better than to make a remark critical of little Evie!

‘Why should it matter what she was wearing?’ Linnet had said when the subsequent insults – and a few rapid blows – had been exchanged. ‘Me mam’s ever so lovely, and you know it, Roddy Sullivan!’

‘Oh aye, she’s pretty,’ Roddy agreed. ‘But you don’t much like Mr Beatty, do you, chuck?’

Linnet had never lied to Roddy and she was not about to start now, especially over Terence Beatty.

‘No,’ she said shortly. ‘But he’s a big impresario in the United States of America; Mammy says he may ask her to star on Broadway!’

Every small cinema-goer knew about Broadway, where unknown girls became stars overnight. And then there was Hollywood, where even little girls and boys could become stars – look at Jackie Coogan! At her words even Roddy looked impressed.

‘Cor! But would you like that, our Linnet? All them traffic cops an’ cowboys an’ Injun braves? Suppose ’e
marries
your mam? Then you’d be ’is kid and you’d live over there for always!’

‘Oh, I’d get used to it, I suppose,’ Linnet had said airily. ‘I’ve never tasted an ice-cream soda.’

And now the crunch had come and Terence Beatty, it appeared, had put his foot down. He wanted, needed, adored Evie, but he neither wanted nor needed, far less adored, her daughter.

‘I
told
him I couldn’t think of leaving you,’ her mother sobbed now, sitting on the little green sofa and filling yet another hanky with her tears. ‘What’ll I do, oh, what’ll I do? Me big chance . . . if only you’d been a little sweeter to him, alanna, if only you’d tried a little harder!’

‘I
did
,’ Linnet said, stung for once by her mother’s blatant unfairness. ‘I’ve done everything, Mammy, run his errands, polished his shoes, made that beastly, sickly pudding he’s so fond of . . .’

‘There you are!’ Evie said triumphantly through her tears. ‘You resented him from the first or you wouldn’t call Italian trifle a beastly, sickly pudding! And now look what’s happened. He simply won’t get you a ticket and when I said I’d buy it he looked at me with flashing eyes and said if I did he’d see I lived to regret it. Oh, Linnet, I’m so very, very unhappy.’

Even at thirteen, Linnet was quite old enough to see that if her mother turned down this opportunity she would blame Linnet for it for the rest of her days. And she would be right, Linnet told herself stoutly, putting the kettle on to make a cup of tea and assuring Evie, in motherly tones, that she must not think of losing the chance of stardom. She, Linnet, would manage just as well with her in America as she had managed when Evie was starring at the Glasgow Empire, or in the summer show on the pier at Scarborough, or up in Blackpool at the wonderful Winter Garden Theatre.

‘But what will people
say
?’ Evie wailed at last, taking the cup of tea Linnet held out to her with a trembling hand. ‘They’ll think I’m a monster of selfishness to leave my little girl and go off to New York with Mr Beatty! I can’t bear that folk will think ill of me, and I’d sooner die than let you down, ástor.’

‘Mam, what else can I say?’ Linnet said at last, when Evie had poured out her feelings ten times over, interlacing them, unfortunately, with reproaches to Linnet for not being nicer to Mr Beatty. ‘I’m happy to stay here – I don’t want to go to New York – so why shouldn’t everyone accept that? My schooling’s important,’ she added cunningly. ‘You’ve said so over and over indeed, so why not simply say I’m staying in Liverpool until I leave the convent?’

‘We-ell now . . . d’you think folk would believe me if I said that, alanna? Every word is true as I stand here, mind, for ’tis an excellent school and I’d not be happy taking you away from the good nuns over to a land where for all I know they may have shockingly bad schools.’ Even as she said the words, a little smile spread across her face and her cheeks began to glow again. Evie was about to convince herself she was doing the right thing and that will at least mean some peace until she goes, Linnet told herself. So be happy with that – and anyway, it’ll stop her remembering she’s thirty years old now. And when she starts crying in front of the mirror because she’s seen a wrinkle and demanding asses’ milk for her skin, at least it’ll be darling Terence who gets sent out for it and not me . . . asses’ milk indeed! How Roddy had laughed when she told him, and how she had jumped at his suggestion that they went round to Ward’s dairy on Limekiln Lane and bought a gallon or so of skim.

‘She won’t know whether it’s from an ass or an ox, just so’s it’s fresh milk,’ he said cheerfully, dragging Linnet through the streets with a clanking bucket in both hands. ‘What did she give you?’

‘Four whole shillings,’ Linnet had said, cheering up. ‘What’ll they charge us for two buckets o’ skim, d’you suppose?’

‘’Bout tenpence, probably. And this time, young Linnet, don’t you go handin’ the change over, meek as – as milk. You hold onto it for the next time she buggers off.’