Miss Purdy's Class (21 page)

She had found the courage to ask Lucy whether he was coming back to Birmingham. ‘He’ll be back,’ Lucy said assuredly. ‘He always comes home to our mam – we just never know when, that’s all.’

But the days had gone past and there was no sign of Daniel’s return. She read that the court had sentenced fifty-three men and three women to terms of hard labour, ranging from three to fifteen months. How could this be? she wondered. If all they were trying to do was to defend their livelihood? Surely they must have done something terrible to be sent to prison to do hard labour. For a time she doubted Daniel. What was he really involved with? After all, she barely knew him. She wasn’t used to being associated with people who went to prison.

When he didn’t return she calmed down a little and tried to persuade herself that it couldn’t possibly matter if she ever saw him again. After all, he was just the brother of one of her pupils: he was nothing to her, nor she to him. It was true that she found his company a novelty. It was exciting. But Daniel must see her as an ignorant little miss, with her comfortable middle-class home. He probably despised her. And she was engaged to be married, for goodness sake! Even if she hadn’t been, Daniel was certainly not the class or type of person her parents could ever conceivably approve of. The very thought was absurd! So she kept herself in a calm, sensible mood and wrote jolly letters to Edwin, telling him the details of her daily life that she thought he would want to hear. And they certainly did not include Daniel. Nor, for that matter, did she describe just what it was like living, these days, in the Soho Road house.

Seventeen

Ariadne shuffled into the breakfast room, bearing a rack of toast which left a trail of blue smoke in the air behind it.

‘I’ve overdone it again just a little bit, haven’t I?’ she said with a playful glance at Harold Purvis. She deposited on the table the charred remnants of what had been a reasonable loaf of bread, shedding a miniature cascade of black crumbs onto the embroidered cloth. Harold Purvis stared gloomily at it. Gwen tackled her egg with the vigour it demanded after fifteen minutes fast boiling and managed to prise the top off to reveal a pale yoke, ruffled and dry as old velvet. She tried not to think about who had slept in whose bedroom last night, or feel Harold’s little sideways glances at her. Every morning was like this now. It might have been amusing to begin with but it certainly wasn’t any more.

While she had been away, things had developed. Almost every night now Ariadne crept along the landing and begged to be let in at Harold’s door. Or Gwen might hear her saying, through the door, ‘You come to me, Harold, darling. Why don’t you come along to me? I’ll be waiting for you.’ And once or twice she had heard him go. She lay in bed picturing Harold plodding along the landing in his striped pyjamas, his white hands hanging below the sleeves. Every time he passed her door she tensed, her heart pounding. He had never tried to come in, but she still had the feeling that he might. She had started pushing her chair up against the door just in case. What with that and Harold’s trumpet dreaming of marble halls every evening, living in Soho Road was becoming a horrible strain.

Ariadne had lately got into the habit of coming down to breakfast in her dressing gown. It was pale green cotton, reaching almost to her ankles and she fastened it very tightly at the waist. Her bright pink slippers had ribbons at the front and made little slip-slap noises as she walked. Her hair was bagged up in a brown net, under which were rollers, and pins securing kiss curls round her forehead. She invariably had lipstick on and had pencilled in her eyebrows.

‘I put my face on after,’ she once confided to Gwen. ‘But I can’t come down completely
naked
, can I?’

Ariadne breakfasted on her usual diet of tea, cigarettes and whichever newspaper came to hand, which this morning was the
Birmingham Gazette
.

Gwen smeared margarine over the raven-coloured toast.

‘Oh, my word,’ Ariadne said, ‘look at this – “Man Chased to His Death by a Dog . . .”’ She took a long drag on her cigarette and blew smoke across the table.

Gwen frowned. ‘So how did he die?’

There was a pause as Ariadne ran her finger along the lines of print.

‘Says here he drowned – jumped off a pier . . . And oh, look – that Nurse Waddingham’s going to be hanged – day after tomorrow.’

Nurse Waddingham had been sentenced in February, but now the hanging was about to happen, on 16 April, and it was the talk of Birmingham. Ariadne was full of it and the teachers at Canal Street School debated the pros and cons in the dinner hour, sitting round on the battered old chairs with their sandwiches.

‘There’s no smoke without fire,’ Miss Monk declared, crossing one hefty brown stockinged leg over the other. ‘She’s benefited from the woman’s will – seems obvious she had a hand in hurrying the old girl’s end. Good riddance to her, the scheming shrew.’ She cast a bitter glance at Charlotte Rowley, as if bracketing her in the insult as well.

Gwen had learned from Ariadne that Nurse Waddingham was a thirty-four-year-old mother of five children, who had been nursing eighty-nine-year-old Louisa Baguley in a home in Nottingham. Both Louisa Baguley and her daughter Ada, who was fifty-five, had died in mysterious circumstances, having willed money to ‘Nurse’ Waddingham.

‘I think it’s a scandal,’ Miss Drysdale declared, with an emphatic gesture which caused tea to spill from her cup onto the brown linoleum. ‘Imagine, that we’re still hanging people in this country. Taking a life for a life – it’s most un-Christian!’

‘Huh – calling
yourself
a Christian!’ Miss Monk scoffed half to herself, and Gwen wondered what on earth she meant. How vile the woman was! Otherwise, though, there was a general murmur of agreement. Mr Gaffney was nodding.

‘You’re right,’ he kept repeating. ‘It’s a terrible thing. Terrible.’ Gwen saw that he was quivering, as he did from time to time, seemingly overcome by his nerves. He had wispy remnants of hair round his bald pate and kind, watery eyes. She wondered what had happened to him in the war.

‘Well, I agree with Mr Lowry,’ Miss Monk pronounced.

‘Of course you do,’ Gwen said, managing to keep her tone so neutral that Agnes Monk wasn’t sure whether she was being insulted or not. Gwen looked back innocently at her, and pulled a cheese and onion cob out of a paper bag. From the corner of her eye she saw the corner of Charlotte Rowley’s mouth twitch with amusement.

Miss Monk glowered suspiciously at Gwen. ‘You may be aware, Miss Purdy, that Mr Lowry is a strong believer in discipline and I have respect for his views.’

‘There’s discipline, and there’s barbarity,’ Lily Drysdale said. ‘The woman has five children – the baby’s only a few months old! Who’s going to bring them up? I shall protest with the others who’ll stand against this, in the strongest terms.’

‘Huh,’ Miss Monk said contemptuously. ‘A lot of good that’ll do you. They’re set to hang her, whatever you say, or that red, Violet Van der Elst, and all her campaigning. Good riddance to her.’

Gwen listened to the arguments, feeling immediately opposed to the hanging because Agnes Monk was for it. Her whole being rebelled against the idea – she thought of the woman waiting in her cell, imagining the rope tightening round her neck, her last gasp of life followed by everlasting darkness. Frightful even if she was guilty. But what if she wasn’t?

‘It
is
barbaric, isn’t it?’ she said to Miss Rowley.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Miss Rowley said. She sat very straight and neatly, her feet lined up side by side in little blue shoes with straps. ‘She took someone else’s life, after all. She showed no pity.’

There was a coldness in the way she spoke that made Gwen like her even less.

The day before the hanging Mr Lowry announced in assembly that school would be starting late the next morning. The streets would be cordoned off round the prison to keep the crowds away until the hanging was over.

Gwen did not sleep at all well that Wednesday night. First of all, when she came back from the bathroom before bed, she found Harold Purvis on the landing, blocking the way to her room. Gwen felt her pulse begin to speed up with alarm. She told herself not to be so silly. What could Harold Purvis do to her, with Ariadne just along the corridor? But he loomed over her, standing there in his suit, shiny with wear and his big black shoes. And she was already in her nightdress, dressing gown over the top with no underwear on and felt naked and very much at a disadvantage.

She folded her arms tightly, and in a sharp tone said, ‘Excuse me – could you please let me get to my room?’

Harold leaned against the wall, facing her, a half smile on his face. Gwen realized instinctively that he wasn’t actually going to do anything, but that he enjoyed the feeling of power he gained from tormenting her.

‘You look very nice,’ he said, in a snaky, repellent voice. ‘Very nice indeed.’

‘I’m waiting to get to bed,’ she said, more annoyed now than alarmed. ‘And I don’t like personal comments, thank you.’

‘Not even nice ones?’ He smiled suggestively.

Not from you
, she wanted to say, but sensed that getting into that kind of banter with him would be to play his game. Instead, she stood her ground, staring back at him.

‘A man can’t resist the sight of a beautiful woman,’ he said softly.

‘No. Well, that’s obvious,’ she snapped, then lurched inwardly with alarm as Harold moved suddenly closer.

‘D’you think
she’s
really what I want?’ His breath stank of onions. ‘An old thing like her, when I can see you in front of me, day after day?’

Gwen froze. To her horror, she felt Harold Purvis’s hand slide round her left buttock, over the silky, peach-coloured dressing gown.

‘You’re
much
more my type,’ he whispered, dealing her another blast of onions.

‘Get
off
!’

She gave him a hard push, and Harold staggered backwards against the opposite wall.

‘Stuck-up little cow!’ she heard as she fled into her room and pushed the chair up against the door.

‘I’ve got to get out of here,’ she thought, sitting up shakily in bed. She didn’t want to turn off the light. She knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. All her senses were alert to what was going on outside her door. Once she was sure things had quietened down outside, she lay in the dark and tried to settle. But she felt humiliated and one nasty thought followed another. Once she’d managed to get her mind off Harold Purvis, the thought of Nurse Waddingham came to her, living through her last night. However must she feel? She imagined her with long, dark hair, sitting with her head lowered, tortured by the thought of her children, soon to be motherless, and of her own remaining hours before her thirty-six-year-old life was snuffed out.

The next morning Gwen picked at her breakfast, which was Ariadne’s porridge – not burnt for once, but still a strangely unpleasant consistency – and avoided looking at Harold Purvis. Ariadne smoked and avidly read bits of yesterday’s paper.

‘“Fiancé’s Suicide on Wedding Eve” – oh, what a
shame
. Found with his head in the gas oven . . . That’ll be money, won’t it?’ She lit another cigarette and turned the page.

‘Here we are . . . Protests outside the prison. That Mrs Van der Elst says she wants aeroplanes flying over, dropping leaflets protesting against capital punishment . . . First woman this century to be executed at Winson Green Prison.’

Gwen swallowed her last mouthful of porridge and fled. It was a relief to be out of the house. She got off the tram a stop early, making her way through the grey morning. There were a lot of people about, milling through the streets as she got closer to the prison, and an atmosphere of anticlimax. The hanging was already over. Following the crowds, she walked to the end of Villiers Street, where the main entrance to the prison loomed forbiddingly, like a dark castle. A row of policemen stood across the entrance and a large number of people were gathered round the gates. Gwen found herself being herded towards them, carried along by the press of people.

‘Why’s everyone going over there?’ she asked a woman whose face was alight with an eager expression.

‘We want to read the death notice!’ the woman said avidly. Gwen found her excitement repugnant. The crowd was under control, but the force of it was still alarming. Gwen was knocked from behind so that her hat was pushed right down over her eyes.

Oh, I’ve had enough of this
, she thought, shoving it back so she could see and trying to push her way towards the edge. There was a lamp post out to the right of the entrance and she headed for that.

‘Here you go.’ A policeman stood aside to let her through as she forced her way out, and stood beside the lamp post to get her breath back, looking back at the prison.

‘Come to join the baying crowd, have you?’

She turned, thinking for a split second that she had mistaken that voice, or dreamt it, but found herself staring up into Daniel’s challenging smile. He looked exactly as he always did: shirtsleeves, no collar and bareheaded today, a cigarette at the corner of his mouth. He was holding in front of him several copies of the
Daily Worker
. Immediately she was aware of a new sense of life, as if a light had gone on.

‘You’re back!’

She felt foolish then, as if she had let him know she had been waiting, and it was only in that moment she realized how much she had been doing just that and the realization made her blush.

‘I’m back,’ Daniel agreed. He took a last drag on his cigarette and threw it down. She wasn’t aware of having seen him smoke before. Edwin didn’t approve of tobacco, she thought, seeing Daniel crush the stub on the cobbles with his heel. ‘Who told you I was away? You been round to find me?’

‘No!’ she said quickly, resenting his assumption that she would come trotting round to find him. But then she saw from his eyes that he was teasing. ‘Lucy told me. She said you were at the trial in Cardiff.’

Daniel’s face darkened. ‘Trial’s not the word,’ he said contemptuously. ‘But yes – I was there.’ He glanced round. ‘Let’s get away from here. Too late now. The woman’s dead. We can’t bring her back. And no one’s buying these.’ He rolled up the
Daily Worker
s and put them in the bag, slung over his shoulder. ‘All too keen on baying for blood.’