The Tide of Life Read online

  Mrs McGillby sighed deeply, lifted the frill of her calico nightdress further up under her chin, then smoothed the sheet that covered the edge of the quilt with her two transparent looking hands before saying, ‘Get along now. But be back, mind, in time for the prayer meeting. I don’t want you running up the stairs at the last minute like last Sunday. You understand?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs McGillby, I’ll be here on time. Goodbye, Mrs McGillby.’ She almost retreated backwards out of the room.

  On the landing she paused for a moment and pressed her hand across her mouth, and it was still there when she closed the staircase door and entered the kitchen, where Sep McGillby, turning from raking some coal from the back of the grate onto the open fire, paused with the rake in his hand and, straightening his back, said, ‘What is it? What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing, Mr McGillby.’

  ‘Come on. Come on.’ He laid the rake down against the edge of the brass-railed high steel fender, then came towards her, saying under his breath, ‘The missis? What’s she been saying to you?’

  ‘Noth…nothing.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It’s…Well, it’s about me hair. She said if I don’t keep it down flat I’ll have to have it cut off, and I can’t keep it flat.’

  ‘She said what!’ He glanced up towards the ceiling, his square blunt-featured face screwed up in an unusual show of anger, which made Emily defend her mistress’s threat, saying, ‘Well, she’s right an’ all, Mr McGillby, because it does flap all over the place, the ends. Anyway, I said I’d snip it off…I mean the ends.’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing.’ He was bending towards her now, his face within inches of hers. ‘Don’t you snip off one single hair of your head. Do you hear me?’

  She drew her chin in and pushed her head back in order to see him better, for he had never used that tone of voice to her before, and she’d never seen him look like this before.

  After a moment he straightened up, and with the edge of his forefinger he wiped the spittle from his lips; then his expression changing to a more recognisable one, he nodded at her and said, ‘Go on, get yourself along. But mind what I’ve told you, leave your hair alone.’

  ‘Yes, Mr McGillby. Thanks, ta.’ She backed from him now, nodding and smiling, until she reached the back door, when, her face lighting up, she said, ‘Ta-rah, Mr McGillby,’ and for answer, he said, ‘Ta-rah, Emily. Enjoy yourself.’

  The McGillbys’ house was fortunately placed, so considered Emily, for it was in the middle of a short street facing the river, and they had only one neighbour, a Mrs Gantry, a widow woman who was stone deaf. If you were standing with your back to the river and looking at the street you wouldn’t think there were any ordinary houses in it at all, for on either side of the McGillbys’ and Mrs Gantry’s houses there were warehouses, and below the warehouse adjoining Mrs Gantry’s was a lock-up grocery shop, and below that a chapel. To the side of the warehouse flanking the McGillbys’ was a cold meat store, and at the very end of the street, which was named Pilot Place, was a second-hand furniture shop, the windows of which extended around the corner into Nile Street. Nile Street was long, and by virtue of the fact alone that the houses were of the two-up and two-down variety they were of much lower class than the two select dwellings in Pilot Place, for both these houses boasted, besides a large kitchen and scullery, a sitting room and two bedrooms. Moreover, there was a cold tap inside the scullery; and that was something to be proud of.

  This latter miracle had been brought about by the manipulations of Mr McGillby. The word was his. Six months ago he had said, ‘I am going to have that tap brought from the bottom of the yard and put inside the scullery. A little manipulation here and there, and there’ll be no more lugging buckets up in the snow.’ And he had gone on to explain the word. ‘People can be manipulated you know, Emily,’ he had said, ‘with a backhander.’ He had demonstrated by scratching the palm of one hand with the middle finger of the other.

  Emily had started working for the McGillbys when she was ten. It had been only weekends then, Friday night from five till eight, and from eight on a Saturday morning till two in the afternoon, and her wage had been sixpence. But the very day she left school she started full-time and living in, with a wage of one and sixpence a week, and she knew she was lucky. Even on washing and baking days when she was never off her feet from half past six in the morning till half past nine at night, and she got undressed for bed with her eyes closed, she would still maintain she was lucky. But whenever she stressed this point to herself she knew it wasn’t only because of the good food and the fact that she was now running the house single-handed, or because of Mr McGillby’s kindness towards her, which was no small thing, but it was because she had a room to herself, a bed to herself, a chest of drawers to herself, a place in which she could be alone and where she could lie and think. Only she hadn’t much time to lie and think. Still, that wasn’t the point. It was the wonder of sleeping by herself, not having to share the bed with three others; not having toenails scratching your legs if you attempted to stretch them out; and not having to listen to the coughing, spluttering, snoring, and the cursing of six children who were in no way related to her, yet whom she was told almost weekly it was her duty to help support, simply because Lucy, her blood sister, was still at school. It was no use telling Alice Broughton that their father left his half-pay note to support Lucy; Alice Broughton just shouted you down and declared she was as good as the wife to John Kennedy and mistress of his house.

  It was ten minutes’ walk from Pilot Place to Creador Street, and it was a nice walk, Emily considered, when like today the sun was shining on the river to the left of her and a big steamer with the smoke coming out of its two funnels was making downriver for the opening between the piers.

  At a certain point on the road she turned sharply right and away from the river, walked along a street of respectable houses, then into a main road, from which jutted a series of less respectable ones; then down into King Street. Here she took a short cut through a maze of small streets.

  It being Sunday, the whole town seemed bereft of adults, and when she came to it, Creador Street was no exception. There were numerous children playing in the back lanes and in the front gutters. Girls were playing the summer game of bays, hopping on one leg, their bare foot pushing the clean-cut bottom of a glass bottle from one chalk-marked paving square to the next; boys, in groups according to their ages, were playing chucks in the gutters; and here and there a bare-bottomed young child crawled on the hot pavements; but nowhere was there the sign of an adult. The main meal over, they would all have retired to bed. At least that would be the pattern in most of the houses around this quarter, except for those cranks who sent their bairns out to Sunday school and took themselves for a walk in the park.

  It had always puzzled Emily why when the sands and the sea were so near, only a matter of minutes away down Ocean Road, most of the children preferred to play in the streets.

  When her mother had been alive she would make her take Lucy down to the sands on every possible occasion because, as she would say, the sea air was good for Lucy’s cough. But even on a very hot day her mother had never accompanied them; she had, like the rest of the people in the street, lain down on a Sunday afternoon.

  18 Creador Street was an upstairs house. It had three rooms, the largest twelve feet by ten. The water had to be carried from a tap in the backyard, which was shared with the people downstairs. The one luxury afforded each house was a separate lavatory, mistermed dry. In the winter when the ashes were plentiful it tended to live up to its name, but as on this June day, when it was warm, as it had been for the past fortnight, the lavatory was anything but dry, and the stench from it and the line of its companions on each side of the back lane was overpowering.

  Every week when Emily entered the house she found herself saying, ‘I’ll never come back here; no matter what happens I’ll never come back here,’ only to realise immediately what a silly thing it was t
o keep telling herself, for she was set for life with Mr and Mrs McGillby.

  Today was no exception to her way of thinking, but to it was added, If only our Lucy was fourteen and away from school I’d get her out of this. That there were only ten more months before this should be was of no comfort to her, for she knew ten months was a long time and anything could happen in ten months. What, particularly, she didn’t put a name to. She only knew her vague fears were connected with Alice Broughton. She would never call the woman Ma, as her da had asked her to.

  There were a number of children in the passageway of No. 18. Two of them were the Broughton boys, Tommy aged ten, and Jack, seven; and the eldest girl, Kate, was there too. The other children she recognised as the Tanners from next door. They all stopped in their play and looked at her. It was Tommy who greeted her, saying ‘Hello. You back then?’ For answer, she said, ‘Where’s Lucy?’

  ‘Upstairs. She’s been gettin’ her hammers.’

  As her eyes flashed from one face to the other, Kate said, ‘She set her lip up to me ma. She said she didn’t take our Tommy’s knife’—she pointed to her brother, who was expertly twirling a penknife round his fingers—‘and she had, she had thrown it down the netty.’

  Emily now hastily pushed her way through them, and Jack’s voice followed her, saying, ‘Have you a ha’penny, our Emily?’

  She made no answer, but having reached the small landing she went towards the middle of the three doors leading off it and, opening it, she entered the kitchen.

  The room was as usual, cluttered and dirty. It held a square table, a battered couch, and an assorted number of chairs, besides a pedal organ and a chest of drawers. She could remember when everything in this room had shone, but that was a long time ago. The room was empty now except for Lucy, who didn’t leap up as usual and run towards her, but sat with her head hanging as if she were half dazed.

  ‘What is it? What’s happened?’ Emily was sitting by her side now holding her hands.

  Lucy made no reply, she just leant her body sideways and rested it against Emily’s. But within a minute Emily had pushed her upright again and was pointing to her face, demanding, ‘She did that? She punched you? Why? What had you done?’ Although Tommy had told her what Lucy had done she couldn’t accept that Alice Broughton would batter Lucy in the face simply because she had thrown away Tommy’s knife; bairns were always pinching each other’s things.

  ‘Had you cheeked her?’

  Lucy blinked and the tears slowly welled into her eyes and ran down her red and swollen cheeks; then drooping her head, she muttered, ‘She’s got a lodger. I don’t like him. He wanted me to sit on his knee an’ I wouldn’t. An’…an’ I told her I’d tell me da when he came home…’ She now raised her wet face upwards. ‘When do you think he’ll be back, Emily?’

  Emily shook her head. It would be a year or more before her father returned; sometimes the voyages would last eighteen months, even as long as two years, and this time he’d been gone only for three months.

  ‘Who is the fellow?’ she asked. ‘Is he a sailor?’

  ‘No; he works in the docks on the prop boats.’

  ‘Where’s he sleepin’?’

  ‘In the back room.’

  ‘That means you’re all in the front room?’

  Lucy nodded.

  ‘An’ her?’

  ‘She says she sleeps out here.’ Lucy patted the couch.

  At this Emily turned her head to the side and bit on her lip, and at that moment the door opened and Alice Broughton entered.

  Alice Broughton was still in her early thirties. She was big-boned, and fleshy; she must, at one time, have been attractive, and there was still some semblance of it left in her round blue eyes and full-lipped mouth. She gave no preliminary greeting to Emily but from the middle of the room she stood looking at the two girls sitting on the couch, while she unfastened another button of her blouse and wafted the collar back and forward from her sweating skin before saying, ‘Well, she’s filled yer ears I suppose, an’ it’ll be no use me saying anything, will it? She’s a damn little thief. She stole our Tommy’s knife and threw it down the netty. He lays great stock by that knife for his whittlin’.’

  ‘Aye, and jabbing it into people’s arms.’ Emily had now risen to her feet; then bending sideways she grabbed at Lucy’s arm and, pulling it up and pointing at it, said, ‘That looks a fresh nick to me.’

  ‘He wouldn’t do it on purpose; it’s when they’re carryin’ on.’

  ‘She doesn’t carry on with your Tommy.’

  ‘Now look here, miss, we’re not goin’ to have another day of it; you never enter this house but there’s trouble. Once your da comes back I’m gonna have somethin’ to say to him.’

  ‘And you’ll not be the only one. Will the lodger be here when he arrives?’ Emily didn’t flinch as she saw the hand flash out towards her, but she cried, ‘You do, Alice Broughton, you do, an’ I’ll go straight from here over to the pollis station, an’ I’ll put a notice in against you for cruelty. What’s more, I’ll tell them you’ve got no right here, you’re not married to me da and you’re gettin’ his half-pay note under false pretences.’

  The colour rose in Alice Broughton’s face until it took on an almost purple hue and she spat out, ‘You young bugger, you! I’ll see me day with you afore me time’s up, I swear on it.’

  And to this Emily answered with a cockiness she was far from feeling, ‘Aye, well, in the meantime you keep your hands off our Lucy or I warn you I’ll go to the pollis station. If that happens your number’ll be up when me da comes back, for although he likes his drink he has never got in trouble with the pollis. If you remember he used to brag about it. He thought it was worth bragging about that he’d had no truck with the pollis. So I’m warning you.’ On this she turned and looked towards Lucy, saying, ‘Get your hat on, we’re going out.’

  Alice Broughton made no protest but her lips compressed tightly for a moment before she said, ‘You’re forgettin’ something, ain’t you?’

  ‘No, I haven’t forgotten anything.’ Emily opened her purse and took out a shilling which she banged on to the table.

  There was silence for a moment in the room as Alice Broughton looked down on the shilling; then slanting her eyes sideways towards Emily, she said, ‘Come on, tip it up, we’re not havin’ any of that. You’ll get your tuppence as usual, an’ you’re lucky to get that.’

  ‘I’m giving you a shilling a week from now on an’ no more. I’ve made up me mind. And I could stop that at any time an’ all, because the half-pay note is so you’ll see to our Lucy. You were supposed to go out to work for your lot, like you did when you first came as housekeeper. Housekeeper…huh!’

  Alice Broughton drew in one long deep breath that pushed her breasts out to fill her open blouse, then she gulped in her throat before spluttering, ‘Get out of me sight while I’ve got some control left. I’ll see me day with you, see if I don’t. I’ve said it an’ I swear by it.’

  Pushing Lucy before her, Emily went out of the room, but as they reached the landing the back bedroom door opened and a man came out. He was wearing a pair of moleskin trousers; the upper part of him was bare and he stood scratching his chest as he looked at them. Then he grinned and said, ‘Well, well, so this is the big sister.’

  Emily said nothing but she stared at him for a moment before again pushing Lucy before her and down the stairs, then through the children and into the street. Her legs were trembling, her whole body was trembling; she had known that one day she would stand up to Alice Broughton but she hadn’t expected to do it today. And she had stood up to her. By, she had that!

  She now looked down at Lucy; then taking her hand she smiled as she asked her, ‘Would you rather go to the park or down to the sands?’

  ‘Down to the sands, Emily.’

  ‘All right.’ Now she bent down to her as they walked along and whispered, ‘And you know what, we’ll spend the sixpence, the whole of it, we’ll bust it.’

/>   ‘The whole of it?’

  ‘Aye, we’ll go to that ice-cream shop near the end of the road an’ we’ll get some hokey-pokey an’ a couple of taffy apples, eh?’

  She was smiling widely now and Lucy smiled in return, and as she had done on the couch she leant her body against Emily’s for a moment; and then, their hands joined, they were running along the almost deserted pavement of Ocean Road which led to the sands and the sea.

  As she ran Emily thought, Eeh! If Mrs McGillby could see me now, she’d check me gallop with that look of hers. By, she would that; and thinking of Mrs McGillby reminded her that she must look out for the time and be back in Pilot Place well before seven to join in the prayer meeting.

  Two

  The bedroom was packed with four men and four women and Mr McGillby and herself. The four men stood at one side of the bed, the four women at the other, and Mr McGillby stood at the foot of the bed. She herself stood near the door so as to be ready to open it when the visitors left, and she wished, oh she wished it would be soon because she was tired. It had been a long day, a hot trying day, and the prayers had been going on for over half an hour and it was stifling in here.

  They were now taking turns reading Jeremiah. Mrs McGillby had started it off by reading the heading of Chapter Thirteen:

  ‘By the type of a linen girdle God prefigures his people’s destruction. By the bottles filled with wine their excess in misery foretold. Exhortation to repentance.’

  Then Mr Goodyear took it up:

  ‘Thus saith the Lord unto me, “Go and get thee a linen girdle, and put it upon thy loins, and put it not in water.”’