The Mill Girls of Albion Lane (18 page)

‘Yes,' Sybil agreed. ‘Harry may come across as too big for his boots now and then but he really doesn't have a bad bone in his body. He's just right for you.'

Later, as Sybil and Lily strolled home together, Sybil was happy to let Lily talk to her heart's content about her new suitor.

‘He's asked me to walk out with him again tomorrow night,' Lily confessed. ‘I'm to choose where we go. What do you think – shall it be the Assembly Rooms or the pictures?'

‘Let him take you dancing,' was Sybil's advice. ‘Wear your best bib and tucker and I'll lend you my silk stockings. Harry will be putty in your hands.'

‘I don't know about that.' Lily sighed. Somehow she didn't see herself as a femme fatale. ‘Anyway, will you and Annie be there?'

‘Not Annie. She's meeting Robert up at Cliff Street market. They're catching a tram and heading off to the new Pavilion in Hadley, his treat.'

‘Poor Sybil,' Lily commiserated. ‘We're leaving you all on your ownio!'

‘Don't you be too sure.' Sybil nudged her arm and winked. ‘How do you know I haven't got my very own beau lined up?'

‘Not the commercial traveller?' Lily enquired, remembering the mysterious older man with whom Sybil had danced a few weeks before.

‘No, not him. I haven't seen hide nor hair of him since. But speak of the devil – here comes my new Prince Charming now!'

Leaving the crush of homebound mill workers to head on up Albion Lane, it was easy for Sybil and Lily to spot Billy whizzing down the hill on his bike, though at first Lily didn't recognize him muffled up behind a thick scarf, with his cap pulled down. He arrived ringing his bell and squealing to a halt beside them.

‘Hello, girls!' he sang out, staying astride his bike and planting his feet firmly on the cobbles. ‘Seeing you two bobby dazzlers brightens up my day, I must say.'

‘I bet you tell that to all the girls,' Sybil countered, while Lily tried to hide her confusion. Had she got this right? Had Sybil really said that Billy was taking her out tomorrow night?

‘Oh, and it helps that we only have four and a half more hours of drudgery tomorrow morning before they set us free from our chains, eh, Lily?'

Lily nodded and out of consideration for Sybil's feelings she swallowed back her questions about Billy and Margie. She waited until Sybil had waved goodbye and disappeared down the alley on to Raglan Road before she tackled the awkward topic. But it was Billy who jumped in before Lily had the chance.

‘I've been meaning to ask you something,' he told her, swinging his long leg over the crossbar and propping his bike against the wall. ‘Will you pass a message to your Margie? Tell her not to expect me outside the Victory tomorrow after all.'

‘Yes, I can see that you'll be busy doing something else,' Lily said with a frown. She was trying to sort out in her own mind who was most in the wrong – Billy for breaking a promise to take Margie out or Margie for not being truthful with him about her present condition.

‘Don't be like that,' he protested. ‘It wasn't a proper arrangement between me and Margie, not really.'

‘But Billy, this is the second time you've stood her up that I know of. How do you think she'll feel?'

He had the good grace to shuffle his feet and try to explain. ‘All right, I admit I was feeling bad about letting her down before and that's why I went up to see her on Ada Street – to say I was sorry.'

‘And why did you let her down in the first place?' Lily wanted to know, pushing for more information than she normally would. ‘She got all dressed up and took the tram to meet you and what did you do? You sent Dorothy to tell her that you weren't coming after all.'

‘I know. I took the coward's way out,' he admitted. ‘But I paid for it by having Dorothy hot on my trail all the rest of that night and for days afterwards. She was like a dog with a bone.'

‘Poor you, Billy.' Lily looked him in the eye as she delivered the sarcastic comment. ‘But you'd better get used to girls fighting over you, the way you carry on.'

‘I expect I deserved that,' he said quietly. ‘But I did tell Margie I was sorry and I did take her to the pictures to make up for it.'

Yes, you took her to the pictures and led her to believe you would treat her better from then on, Lily thought gloomily, but now you've let her down all over again. ‘I'm sorry, Billy,' she told him, ‘but I won't pass on the message. You'll have to tell Margie yourself.'

Her answer made him turn away sharply. He looked as though he was about to cycle away but then changed his mind and looked straight at Lily. ‘You know the trouble with your Margie?' he said angrily. ‘She's the sort of girl who doesn't go in for half measures. No, not her – she just throws herself at a fellow.'

‘Billy!' Lily interrupted. ‘I don't want to listen to this.'

‘You might not want to hear it, Lil, because you're different. You're a nice girl, you don't chuck yourself at a bloke the way Margie does.'

‘Billy, she's sixteen!'

‘I know. You don't need to tell me that. But someone should have taught her by this time how to behave. You can't have her dolling herself up and coming on strong the way she does, not without something bad happening.'

Lily let out a deflated sigh and gave a single, defeated nod.

‘She did it to me again last Saturday, after we took the tram back to Ada Street. We got off at the stop and you know the gates into Linton Park? Well, Margie stopped there and wanted me to take her into the park and it was freezing and pitch black and there wasn't a soul around. So I said no I would take her straight back to her granddad's house, and that's when she did it – she chucked herself right at me.'

‘Billy, stop – don't tell me any more.' At that moment Lily could have cried for her sister and her desperate state of mind.

‘Anyway, that's why I'm not taking her out again, even though she's written me a letter, all cheerful and saying how much she was looking forward to meeting up again this Saturday.'

‘She wrote you a letter?' Lily said faintly. Poor Margie, stranded up at Overcliffe with Granddad Preston and making more of a mess of things with each day that passed.

‘It put me into a right stew,' Billy confessed. ‘I did feel sorry for her for a day or two and I thought, Why not take the poor girl to the pictures again – what's the harm? But then I decided no, on the whole it's best not to have any more to do with Margie Briggs. And now I've told you and got it off my chest I don't think there's any more to be said.'

‘No, you go out and enjoy yourself with Sybil instead,' Lily said, thinking him callow and resisting the urge to give him a sharp slap on the cheek.

Billy winced then jutted out his chin. ‘It's for the best,' he insisted.

‘Best for who, Billy?'

‘For everyone,' he concluded, leaving Lily standing on the street, picking over the ins and outs of what Billy had said and working out with a sinking heart the bleak future that surely lay ahead for her headstrong, misguided sister.

‘Arthur has collared me to make Christmas decorations with him when I get home,' Evie told Lily as they clocked off from the morning shift next day. ‘I promised I'd buy some gummed paper in Newby's. We'll cut it into strips and make a chain of coloured hoops to string across the front window.'

‘That's nice, ‘Lily answered absent-mindedly. The busy morning in the mending room had kept her mind off the ever-present Margie problem but now as she and Evie walked home along the icy pavement she had to make up her mind whether or not to deliver Billy's message after all. She shared her dilemma with her youngest sister as they stopped for traffic and stood well back from the hooting, chugging Austins and Jowetts that threaded their way through the crowds.

‘Make sure Margie doesn't take it out on you if you do go up to Ada Street,' Evie warned. ‘Tell her it's not your fault – it's Billy's.'

‘Ah, but it'll be a case of shooting the messenger,' Lily predicted. ‘It usually is with Margie.'

There was more riding on Billy's change of heart than Evie knew, of course. In any event, by the time Evie had slipped into the newsagent's for the brightly coloured gummed paper, Lily had decided to carry on past number 5 to catch a tram to Overcliffe. After all was said and done, it wouldn't do to have Margie turning out on this cold night and catching the tram into town, only to find herself stood up once again by Billy Robertshaw.

She didn't relish the task and was pushed further down in the dumps by having to wait longer than usual for the tram on one of those grey days that scarcely gets light, standing in a bracing wind and trying not to mind the cold. Shivering at the stop for ten minutes, she eventually turned her back against the wind and stared down Albion Lane in time to see her mother struggling up the hill towards her.

Startled, Lily ran to meet her. ‘Mother, what are you doing out of the house?' she demanded, almost afraid that the wind would knock her over.

‘What's it look like?' Rhoda trudged on up the hill. ‘I'm heading for the stop to catch the next tram out to Overcliffe.'

‘To see Margie?' The news came to Lily as a bolt out of the blue. ‘Are you sure you want to?'

‘Yes, and why not?' Rhoda demanded. ‘Margie's still my flesh and blood, isn't she?'

‘But, Mother, are you sure you're well enough?'

‘It's high time me and Margie had a talk,' Rhoda said with an air of defiance strongly reminiscent of Margie at her most stubborn. ‘If I know her, Saturday afternoon will be a good time to catch her in. She'll be washing her hair and primping and preening ready for a night out.'

Lily was still trying to get over the shock of seeing Rhoda make her laborious way up the hill, her face pinched and exhausted, her figure as small and slight as a child's, but she nodded and said that they should go to Granddad Preston's house together. ‘I have to pass on a message from Billy to Margie,' she explained.

For a moment Rhoda knitted her brows and clung to her argumentative air. ‘Very well then, you can ride on the tram with me but when you get to your granddad's house, you have to let me talk to Margie on my own.'

‘If that's what you want.' As a tram hove into view, Lily reluctantly abandoned her planned role as mediator and decided to let her mother and sister argue things out.

With a grind of brakes the tram jolted to a halt and the two women climbed on, Lily paying the fare for both of them and allowing Rhoda a seat near to the window where she sat without speaking, staring out across the moor. Fellow passengers who bothered to give the pair a second glance would have noted a small, upright woman with a heavy grey shawl crossed tightly over her chest, wearing a brown felt hat held in place by a feathered hatpin sitting next to a striking but nervous younger woman in smart grey velour hat and coat, possibly her daughter though the softness of her face and fullness of her lips plus the strands of dark, wavy hair escaping from under the hat of the latter disguised the family resemblance. Look more closely, though, and it was there in the brown eyes and the shared mannerisms – the upward tilt of the chin and the crossing of the hands on the lap, the polite ‘excuse me' and ‘thank you' as they rose from their seats and made their way down the crowded aisle to alight at their stop beside the entrance to Linton Park.

‘Let's get this over and done with, shall we?' Rhoda said through clenched teeth, crossing the road and heading on down Ada Street to her childhood home.

What memories it must hold. Lily thought back to the days when the young Rhoda had lived here with her three brothers – this house on the hill with its back turned to the soot and the smoke of the town, overlooking crags and hills, buffeted by wind and rain. Back then, at the turn of the century, there had been sunny gala days with processions and brass bands, jubilee celebrations and Empire Days with red, white and blue bunting strung across the smartly kept street. She'd seen faded photos of these events – the women standing at trestle tables in long skirts and big-sleeved white blouses, their hair pinned high on their heads, the men in shirtsleeves and waistcoats, some in bowler hats, leading carthorses bedecked with brasses and ribbons or perched on the seats of monstrous traction engines that puffed and trundled along the cobbled streets.

Those were the days, people said – more prosperous, more hopeful, before the Great War had cast its long shadow and the Depression had set in, when Rhoda's little family had lived happily here on the hill.

Rhoda's stride was slow but purposeful over the short distance from the tram stop to her father's house. There was no hesitation as she climbed the stone steps and lifted the door knocker. Lily's heart raced. She hoped against all the odds that there wouldn't be conflict, that what had to be said between her mother and Margie would take place reasonably and harmony would result.

Bert Preston showed no surprise as he opened the door and let Rhoda and Lily into the house. ‘You took your time.' The old man's hoarse comment was directed at Rhoda. He stared hard at her through narrowed eyes, bushy eyebrows knotted, then let the visitors walk ahead of him down the narrow passage, past the unfrequented front living room with its black horsehair sofa and grey marble fireplace and on into the back kitchen. It was much like the kitchen at Albion Lane, with its cooking range and rough deal table but minus the womanly touches of lace curtains and china ornaments and without the precious treadle sewing machine in the corner that Lily set such store by.

Rhoda cast an eye around the sparsely furnished room. ‘I've come to see Margie. Is she in?'

‘She's upstairs. She'll have heard you arrive.' If Bert had an opinion about this delayed visit, he kept it to himself, merely filling the iron kettle at the tap and setting it on the hob. ‘Shall I bring her down?'