Beyond the Veil of Tears (34 page)

Angeline had been at the draper’s for just over a year when she and May had moved into the downstairs of a house a short distance away in Dean Street, further from the wharfs. Here they
had a front room, which they used as their bedroom, and a kitchen with a range and room for a table and chairs and two armchairs. A pair of spinster sisters occupied the top floor of the two-up,
two-down terrace; quiet, clean women who worked at a laundry in the town. It was bliss after being confined to one room and having to share a privy with the other tenants of the house, who
hadn’t been too particular in their habits. Now the privy in the small back yard was kept fresh and sweet with daily buckets of ash by the four women, and the days of clearing up other
folk’s excreta – including vomit on a Friday night when the men got paid – became a thing of the past. King Street had been a harsh baptism into her new life, but it had taught
Angeline plenty.

Shortly after she and May had settled into their new home, Angeline had heard that the shop next door to the draper’s, a bakery, would soon require another assistant, when one of the two
girls employed by the baker and his wife left to get married. After putting in a good word for May with the baker’s wife, with whom she often passed the time of day when buying her daily
loaf, Angeline persuaded her friend to go and make herself known to the couple. The result was that May was offered the position and started work at the bakery the day after the other girl left.
The rope factory had been hard, rough and exhausting work, and the women workers who did the same job as the men got paid half the wage of their male counterparts, something that had always rankled
with May, although most of the other women seemed to accept it as natural.

The bakery didn’t pay as much as May could earn in the factory, but Angeline had recently had a rise at work, which covered the shortfall, besides which she desperately wanted to see May
leave the factory behind. Even after a year May’s hands had been raw and bleeding at the end of each six-day week, and her friend had slept each Sunday away in an exhausted stupor.

There had followed a period of calm routine, and after the events of the previous years their run-of-the-mill days and nights had been pleasant and welcome. Angeline and May had enjoyed their
little home, and although May sometimes went to the picture house with the other assistant at the bakery or out for the day on a Sunday with Jack and his group of friends, Angeline never
accompanied them. She had bought herself a Remington typewriter and a book by Isaac Pitman, who had developed a new shorthand system, using signs for sounds, but being unable to really afford the
shorthand and typing courses that the local school board was running in the evening, had decided to teach herself in any spare time she had.

Although she genuinely wanted to learn shorthand and typing, secretly it was also something of an excuse for her hermit-like behaviour, once she was home. She confided to May she was always
worried that she might be seen by someone who recognized her from the past, but again that wasn’t the whole reason for her withdrawal. The main reason was Jack Connor. It had been some months
after she had met him, and whilst she and May were still living in King Street, that they had gone to hear him speak at a meeting down by Castle Square at the back of the fish market. It had been a
cold but dry October evening, and the smell of fish had been strong, but once Jack had begun speaking he had held his listeners enthralled, in spite of the odd heckler, who was more often than not
one of his pals. Jack had talked about a better future for the unborn children of the working class; a country without employment of workers at starvation rates, without rack-renting of insanitary
tenements and an absence of opportunities for education of the poor; a land where the death of a child before it was one year old wasn’t determined by the area in which it was born.

She had stood with her arm linked in May’s, her nose pink with the cold and her feet numb, and had seen Utopia. Jack had captured her imagination in a way no one else had ever done, and at
one point in his discourse, when his green eyes had looked over the crowd and straight into hers, she knew he had captured her heart, too. She loved him. She had been frozen in shock. May’s
brother, Jack Connor, who despised and loathed the upper classes and all they stood for, and who was contemptuous of the sort of woman she had been. ‘Empty-headed dolls,’ he’d
called the society ladies once, when he’d been talking with his pals, ‘not fit to be called women at all.’ And when one of his friends had asked him if that wasn’t a little
harsh, Jack had said how else could you describe a breed of female who could stand by and see the wretchedness of little ones begging in the gutters for a penny or two, when their own children were
dressed in furs and lace and had umpteen servants to cater to their every need? ‘You’ve seen what our women contend with,’ he’d said. ‘The unending struggle with
poverty, the stillbirths, the miscarriages, and the old wives who butcher their own sex who’ve gone to them in desperation, to get rid of another unwanted mouth to feed. Mothers leading their
bairns into the workhouse, cos it’s that or seeing them starve. You’ve
seen
it. And what woman with bairns round here doesn’t look twenty, thirty years older than she is?
And you talk to me about being harsh? Wake up, man!’

Angeline had left May that night pleading a headache, and had gone home to weep for hours. And then she had put the lid on that box in her mind and had stored it away deep in the heart of her.
Jack thought her cold and unapproachable – she’d heard him describe her that way to May once, when he hadn’t known she could hear; but better that than the truth. Warm and loving
as he was to May, with her he was invariably cool and reserved, even taciturn on occasions. It hurt her, causing an ever-present gnawing ache that flared into exquisite pain when she was in his
presence, but there was nothing she could do about it. She lived in fear of the day when one of the girls who, according to May, were shameless in their pursuit of Jack would catch his fancy, but
again that was outside her control.

And then, a year ago, yet another phase of her life had begun. May had met and married the miller’s son who supplied the bakery with flour, and a month or so before the
wedding, Angeline had decided to try for an office post. May’s impending nuptials had been the catalyst for change. Her friend’s leaving would create a huge hole in Angeline’s
life. A new job would, of necessity, be a channel for her time and thoughts. She knew her shorthand and typing skills were good, but having no experience of office work and being happy at the
draper’s and at home with May for company, she’d resisted spreading her wings and leaving the safety of the niche she had carved out for herself.

After buying a newspaper she had replied to two advertisements, one for a copy typist at the town hall and the other for a secretary to the manager of an engineering works just across the river,
not far from the rope and wire works where May had once been employed. The town hall had written a polite letter saying they’d already been suited, but thanking her for her application, and
the engineering works had granted her an interview the very next day. She had been thrown into a state of panic, and later that night when Jack had come round to share their evening meal – a
regular occurrence twice a week, which was a source of mixed pain and pleasure for Angeline – he had found a very different person from the cool young woman he was accustomed to.

He had recently passed the last of his examinations to qualify as a solicitor, but had been turned down by two firms in the town – probably, as he himself admitted, because he didn’t
fit the middle-class image they were looking for. He was an oddity, working-class and proud of it, and not to be trusted. Consequently, and frustratingly, he was continuing in the same position as
clerk to his present employer. That night, however, he had put his own disappointment and resentment aside and had risen to the occasion. He had been encouraging and reassuring, warm and even
tender when Angeline had disgraced herself by weeping all over him and insisting she was out of her depth.

For the first time since they’d met he’d held her close, murmuring that she could do anything she put her mind to. May had fussed about making a pot of tea. Angeline had been
conscious of the controlled gentleness of Jack’s big male body, of the clean, soapy smell of him and of never wanting the moment to end. The strength of her feeling had terrified her, and as
soon as she could she’d made the excuse of a headache and had retired to the front room to go to bed.

The next day she had attended the interview and had been offered the job and a starting salary of twenty-five shillings a week, fifteen shillings more than she had been earning at the
draper’s. It ought to have made her ecstatic, but all she could think about as she had walked home was how it had felt to be in Jack’s arms and what a terrible mess she had made of her
life. She was living a lie. Grace Cunningham didn’t exist. Angeline Golding, on the other hand, was a married woman who was in love with another man – a man who could never know who she
really was. Her career would have to be her life. She would grow old, childless and lonely, destined to be an aunt to any children May might have, but never holding her own little one in her arms.
It was her bleakest hour.

She had gone and bought a cup of tea and a cake she didn’t want in a dingy little cafe, returning home much later to find Jack and May waiting to hear how she had got on. She had accepted
Jack’s congratulations with a polite smile, and when he had given her a brief hug she had stepped back quickly, her body stiff and her face tense. From that day to this he had never touched
her again.

Within weeks of May’s marriage, Angeline moved across the river. She had found a small two-up, two-down terraced house in Garden Street close to the engineering works, which she rented for
four shillings a week. She had gradually furnished it the way she wanted, and with the new job proving to be interesting and absorbing, she told herself she was lucky. Sometimes, especially the
nights when she didn’t work overtime and the evening stretched before her endlessly, she had to tell herself more fiercely than usual that she was lucky.

May’s husband was a nice man and brought his wife to see Angeline once a week, taking himself off to meet up with pals at a public house in Newcastle so the two women could have dinner
together and a good natter. After a while Jack had taken to joining them, ostensibly so that he could walk May back across the river and deliver her safely to her husband. It had seemed churlish
not to invite him for dinner after he’d done this a few times, and thereafter a pattern had been set. Every Monday, without fail, the three of them would eat together and chat for a while,
before Jack and May left to make their way across the bridge into Newcastle. Last week Angeline had told them she didn’t expect them the following Monday, it being New Year’s Day, but
they’d both assured her they would come.

Now she carried the tray of coffee that the three of them always had after their meal across the sitting room and put it on the coffee table, around which was placed a three-piece suite. It was
a cosy room, and unusual in as much as Angeline hadn’t decorated it with the dark, serviceable colours most folks favoured; nor had she chosen a stiff horsehair suite and solid, heavy
furniture, with the inevitable aspidistra in front of the window. Instead the walls were painted a pale yellow, the same colour as the flowery curtains at the window, and there were no starched
nets. The sunny theme continued with the three-piece suite, which was made out of bamboo, with big, plump seats in gold brocade that were comfortable enough to doze in. A thick patterned carpet in
the varying shades of autumn leaves covered the entire floor, and the bookcase and coffee table were also fashioned from bamboo. A large picture featuring a woodland scene sat on one wall and a
gold-framed mirror hung over the small fireplace, but otherwise the walls were bare.

When May had first seen the newly decorated room she had secretly wondered where the tablecloths and runners, antimacassars and cushions, pot plants and vases and porcelain figurines were. And
just one picture on the wall? A front room was a showpiece, for those fortunate enough to have one. She had been further surprised when it became clear that Angeline intended to use the room every
day, and merely cook and eat in the kitchen with its big scrubbed oak table and four chairs. She had said as much to Jack, and when he had quietly replied that he thought the room was perfect, she
had said no more.

She glanced at her brother now as he sat with his legs stretched out, puffing on his pipe, his eyes half-closed. He appeared perfectly relaxed and maybe he was, but it was difficult to tell with
Jack. There had been the odd occasion once or twice – just a handful of times in all – over the last years when May had thought he might be sweet on Grace. Not that Jack had ever
intimated it, quite the contrary in fact, but nevertheless . . . She had said as much to Howard and he’d laughed his head off, before telling her she was imagining things. And maybe she was.
Certainly Grace wasn’t interested in Jack, or any other man for that matter, and who could blame her after what she’d been through?

May accepted her cup of coffee from Angeline with a smile, thinking how pretty she looked with a slight flush to her cheeks, no doubt from the cooking. It was a shame Grace would never have her
own husband and bairns, though, even if she seemed happy enough with her job and her home. But then, she
did
have a husband. May kept forgetting that. They had decided early on that even
when they were alone she should call Angeline ‘Grace’, it was safer that way, and as time had gone by, it had become second nature – to the extent that she didn’t think of
her as Angeline any more, or that she was a married woman with a husband.

Mentally shaking her head at her rambling thoughts, May put down her coffee cup. ‘I’ve an announcement to make, and seeing it’s the first day of a new year, it couldn’t
be a better time.’