The Mill Girls of Albion Lane (33 page)

‘He won't want to speak to you,' Betty insisted uneasily. It sat ill with her to treat Lily like this, but Harry had arrived home early and had gone up to his room insisting that he didn't want to see anyone. Since then, the police had come and gone without a word of explanation from her son.

‘But he is here, isn't he?' Lily contradicted gently, looking beyond Betty and up the dark stairway. ‘Honestly, Mrs Bainbridge, I only want a quick word.'

‘He's not fit to talk to. The police have been. I've no idea what's going on.'

‘Is he upstairs?'

Betty nodded and gave way as Lily brushed past and went quickly up then paused on the landing. Would Harry's room be at the back or the front of the house? she wondered.

Harry himself answered the question by opening the door to the back bedroom. ‘What do you want?' he demanded, appearing barefoot in shirtsleeves and braces, one end of his collar hanging loose.

In spite of everything, Lily couldn't prevent her heart from skipping a beat at the sight of his handsome face and she realized in a rush how much she'd missed him. ‘I only want to know what happened to Billy,' she explained, almost wilting under his angry gaze but somehow finding the strength to go on. ‘And to know that you're all right.'

His eyes flickered shut then opened into a defiant stare. ‘What does it matter to you whether or not I'm all right?'

‘It does matter, Harry. Of course it does.' More than anything, she realized as her heart went out to him, standing pale and angry, his hand grasping the door knob, his shirt open at the throat. ‘Let me in, please.'

Swallowing hard and silently working his jaw, Harry finally decided to do as she asked. He stood meekly to one side and allowed her into the room.

Lily felt nevertheless as if she was trespassing. This was a place where she shouldn't be – a foreign country containing Harry's iron bedstead with one of the four brass knobs missing, a mahogany wardrobe with its door hanging open, faded striped wallpaper, a small cast-iron fireplace and shallow, empty grate. Taking a deep breath she turned to face Harry.

‘Well?' he wanted to know.

Where to begin? ‘Let's start with Billy,' she suggested quietly.

‘You know as much as I do,' Harry told her, closing the door. ‘More, most likely.'

‘Not really. Bob Godwin down at the hospital says it's bad, though.'

‘But he hasn't … he's still alive?'

‘Yes, as far as I know.' She watched his reaction – his eyes flicked shut and he drew a deep breath as he recalled the sight of Billy's bloodstained, con torted body when he'd found him lying unconscious in amongst the Calverts' garden tools. ‘I'm sorry, Harry. Billy's your best pal. You must be feeling rotten.'

Harry nodded without opening his eyes. ‘I can't help thinking, Why the hell did he have to ride up there after work? Why couldn't he have gone straight home, or to the match? Then none of this would've happened.'

‘But even if it's as bad as they say, Billy could still pull through.'

‘He could,' Harry agreed through gritted teeth. ‘Did you hear that Mr Calvert called me back up to Moor House soon after the ambulance had carted Billy off to hospital and I'd made my way home?'

‘Whatever for?' Lily wanted to know.

‘Hang on and I'll tell you. I went all the way back up on my push-bike, even though it had started to snow by the time I got there. Anyway, what the boss had to say didn't take five minutes – just enough time for him to come out of the servants' entrance, hand me my cards and tell me not to bother coming back.'

‘Oh, Harry!' Lily sighed. She got up and went to stand beside him.

‘It's all right, I was expecting it. The coppers had already looked at the damage to the Bentley by the time I got there. Mr Calvert's not the type to look before he leaps – you know what he's like.'

‘But he can't blame you, not if you didn't do anything wrong.'

‘He can and he did,' Harry argued, staring straight ahead. ‘I reckon he or his missis would be the ones who set the coppers on to me in the first place.'

Lily followed his line of vision, out beyond the ash pit and stone outhouses, over the roofs of the houses opposite, into the dark snow-laden sky. ‘That's not right,' she said quietly. ‘Not without proof.'

‘What's proof got to do with anything? A man like Calvert can accuse whoever he likes.'

Closing her eyes to shut out the sight of whirling snowflakes, Lily took courage and slid her hand through the crook of Harry's elbow. She felt him flinch but he let it rest there.

‘What are you doing here, Lily?' he asked after a long silence. ‘I thought you didn't care anything about me.'

‘That's not true.'

‘You said you didn't love me.'

‘I didn't, Harry. I said I couldn't marry you – that's not the same thing.'

‘So you still feel something for me?' He turned to look down at her, his face in shadow. She couldn't make out his mood and had to judge by the softness of his voice.

‘Yes,' she whispered.

‘You know the coppers will keep on coming after me, don't you?' he murmured.

‘No, Harry – don't think like that!'

‘They will. They'll say I ran Billy over and hid him in the store room, left him there to die.'

‘But you didn't,' she insisted, turning him towards her then resting her hands on his shoulders. ‘I know you, Harry. You would never do a thing like that.'

As she spoke, he encircled her wrists with his strong hands then leaned forward to rest his forehead against hers.

‘I do love you, and I always will,' she breathed and the relief of her confession brought tears to her eyes.

‘Whatever happens?' he murmured, hearing the words and letting them slowly sink in.

‘Yes.'

Harry's kiss was slow and gentle, different from the others that they'd exchanged – deeper, sadder, more lingering. It set a seal on how they felt, for better or worse.

All Sunday Billy lay unconscious on his hospital bed until, late in the evening, word got out that he'd come round.

‘They say he's cracked a few ribs, broken a leg and fractured his skull,' Peggy told Evie and Lily at the door of number 5. She'd struggled through twelve inches of snow and up the deserted street to deliver the news. ‘They expect he'll live though.'

‘What did I tell you!' Sybil cried when Lily handed on the news to her and Annie during the morning trudge to work next day.

By now the snow had stopped and people had been out with hand-made snow shifters – sheets of plywood nailed to broom handles – clearing the footpaths and banking the heavy snow in rough heaps at the sides of the roads. A freezing wind pinched faces, fingers and toes and most people wore an extra pair of socks and thick mittens, knowing that chilblains and chapped skin would follow if they ignored the icy conditions.

‘Yes, it's a big weight off everyone's minds,' Lily admitted – not least because Billy would now be able to give an account of what had happened and Harry would be off the hook. Whether or not Stanley Calvert would give him his job back was another matter.

At twenty-five minutes past seven, the relieved friends parted, each promising to find out as much information as they could about the improvement in Billy's condition. At half past, Lily was at her station and opening her tin of tools, glancing out of the window to see Winifred arriving in a taxi and dodging quickly under the main archway out of sight.

‘Not so high and mighty now, is she?' Jennie remarked with evident satisfaction until Miss Valentine caught her eye and made her carry on with a bolt of tweed cloth to Ethel's station on the other side of the room.

Lily thought Winifred had looked upset – pale and drawn – which proved that the events at Moor House had affected everyone involved.

As she settled into work with her burling iron and needle, her thoughts turned to Harry and her heartfelt promise that she would always love him, no matter what.

She was still so absorbed in the memory that she didn't notice the half-past-twelve buzzer sound and it wasn't until the manageress approached her with a brown parcel that she looked up.

‘Now then, Lily, it's not like you to be slow off the mark,' Miss Valentine commented. The parcel contained her mother's winter coat which Lily had promised to alter so she placed it under her table and quickly ran along to the canteen, where she joined Sybil and Annie at a table with Jennie and Mary. As expected, the talk was still all about Billy.

‘He's come round but he's not saying a lot,' Mary reported. ‘I hear they've dosed him up to the eyeballs, that's the reason.'

‘He's not out of the woods yet, then,' Jennie opined above the rattle of cutlery and the hiss of steam from the copper boiler behind the counter. ‘And guess what else I heard from one of the Kingsley girls.'

‘What?' Annie prompted uneasily.

‘They're saying that Billy and Harry got into a fight on Saturday.'

‘Before Billy's accident?' Sybil was the first to speak after a general gasp of disbelief.

‘So-called “accident”,' a sceptical Jennie added
sotto voce
.

Lily, faced with her dinner order of pork pie and peas, froze in alarm. A moment later, she'd recovered enough to leap to Harry's defence. ‘Harry never said a word to me about a fight,' she told Annie and Sybil. ‘He would have mentioned it, wouldn't he?'

‘If it had happened – yes he would,' Annie agreed.

Jennie, though, was in full flow. ‘From what I heard, Winifred came out of the house and caught them scrapping on the front lawn. They stopped as soon as they saw her, but that's definitely the way it was.'

‘Well, I wouldn't put it past Winifred to make something out of nothing, or anyone else to make it up, come to that,' Annie said before this new rumour got out of hand. ‘Let's wait until Billy comes round properly, shall we?'

Her stern remark stemmed the tide of gossip and Lily cast a grateful glance in Annie's direction. Still she felt too queasy to eat her dinner and returned to the mending room with a sense of dread that she couldn't shake off. She worked all afternoon without glancing up once, afraid of risking a told-you-so look from her fellow menders that might eat away at her trust in Harry. At five o'clock she lingered, waiting until the others had gone before picking up the manageress's brown parcel, clocking off and taking her hat and coat from the hook outside Miss Valentine's office.

She was still buttoning up her coat when the click of the phone in its cradle and the turn of the door handle alerted her to the fact that the manageress was emerging into the mending room.

‘My dear,' Miss Valentine said in a voice so full of emotion and unlike her own that Lily's fingers stopped on the last-but-one button. ‘I'm glad I've caught you before you leave. You'd better come into my office and sit down. I have some bad news.'

It was true – the world slowed almost to a halt just at that moment when it fell apart. Lily heard the tick of the clock in the manageress's office, had time to put down the parcel and rest her gaze on the intricate embossed pattern on Miss Valentine's silver belt buckle. Then she let the question form on her lips: ‘Is it about Mother?'

‘No, it's not Rhoda,' the manageress said, deliberately sitting Lily in her own chair and waiting until she had her full attention. ‘It's Billy.'

‘What about him?' Lily stalled. She knew – of course, she knew.

‘Mr Calvert was speaking with Mr Wilson on the telephone. There's news from the hospital, which Mr Wilson has just passed on to me. Billy's injuries were worse than we thought. He died two hours ago.'

In a flash Lily recollected Billy's lean, ruddy face the last time she'd seen him, she heard his voice teasing her about being in too much of a hurry, breaking into raucous song about the runaway train.

‘He can't have,' she faltered. He was too full of life, too strong and resilient. His young, broken bones would mend and he would soon be back under the lamp post with Harry and Ernie at the top of Albion Lane, kicking a ball around on the Common after the snow had melted, resting his elbows on the bar at the Green Cross on a Friday night, going to watch the match on Saturdays, launching out on to the dance floor with Gladys or Maureen or Sybil.

‘I'm afraid it's true,' Iris Valentine insisted gravely. ‘It was to do with the injury to his skull. There was bleeding the doctors couldn't see or do anything about and he died without them being able to save him.'

Lily tilted her head back as if somehow this would stop her tears from falling. Poor Billy, with his whole life ahead of him.

‘I'm afraid there's worse,' Miss Valentine said as gently as she could. ‘I don't go around with my eyes closed, Lily dear – I've noticed along with everyone else here at Calvert's that you've developed a soft spot for Harry Bainbridge.'

The clock ticked. Through her tears Lily made out the cream-painted ceiling, the shelves stacked with ledgers, the manageress's glasses glinting on her dainty face, the pattern on her buckle – everything out of focus, every fuzzy detail imprinted on her memory.

‘I think you should know that the police have arrested Harry and taken him to Canal Road police station.'

‘Whatever for?' Lily cried. She tried to stand up but her legs were too weak so she sat unable to move, wishing for it all to go away like a bad dream.

‘They say it was Harry who killed Billy,' came the apologetic reply. ‘Unless a miracle happens or some other evidence comes to light, Harry will have to go before the judge charged with murder.'

On Tuesday 14 January 1932, at eleven o'clock on the dot, the order was given to shut down the steam engines that drove the combs and looms in the spinning and weaving sheds at Calvert's Mill. Stokers downed shovels and closed the furnace doors. A thousand bobbins stopped turning; weavers left off winding the warp on to their beams.