The Girl From Barefoot House (26 page)

‘Miss Chalcott’s cerebral writing was well before its time. The day may well come when she will be recognised as one of this century’s major poets …’

There was more, about Louisa’s unconventional lifestyle, her legendary lovers, that she had never married but had borne twin daughters to a man she refused to name.

‘That’s because she didn’t know who it was,’ Josie said, showing the cutting to Jack. She felt incredibly sad, but at the same time relieved that Louisa had departed from this world painlessly, and in her sleep.

‘Try not to let it worry you, sweetheart. She’s gone to a better place, as my mother would say.’

‘Louisa would do her nut if she thought I’d let it spoil me wedding day. As regards her being in a better place, I doubt it. She’s probably in hell, trying to seduce Old Nick as we speak.’

The ceremony was held at midday in a little Italian church off Hester Street, only a short walk from where they lived. Jack had borrowed a respectable suit, black and white pinstriped. He looked like a member of the Mafia. The church was crowded with his friends, whom Josie had never come to regard as hers. She had always felt very much in his shadow, and sensed they resented her, as they would have resented any woman their hero had chosen to fall in love with.

Now they would resent her even more. Not only was she marrying him, but she was taking him to England, to London, though it was Jack’s idea, not hers.

He had come bursting into the apartment days ago, his dark eyes alight with excitement. ‘Hey, I’ve had a brainwave. Let’s go live in England. That’s what two of the blacklisted directors did – Joseph Losey and Carl Foreman. No one there gives a shit about your politics. I can start again, submit my plays – and boast of a Broadway production under my belt.’

‘Off-Broadway,’ Josie reminded him, at the same time trying to get her brain to adjust to the idea of them living somewhere else. Jack, she felt, was
part
of New York. He belonged here, every bit as much as the Empire State
Building and the Statue of Liberty. Would he be happy in a place that was so utterly different? She reminded herself that he’d been born in Liverpool. England was his country as much as hers.

‘Don’t be a wet blanket. Off-Broadway, on-Broadway, it still sounds impressive.’ He began to pace the floor, his excitement growing. Josie sometimes wondered if electricity rather than blood flowed through his veins. ‘Oh, God, Josie. Why didn’t I think of it before?’ he whooped. ‘It makes even more sense now with the baby – no medical fees, for one. I don’t want some makeshift midwife delivering the little chap in here, and we couldn’t afford a hospital.’ He came over and kissed her tenderly. ‘We’ll live in London, where the contacts are – the agents, the actors, most of the theatres. I’ll get a job, and you’ll be a lady of leisure in our little apartment in Mayfair overlooking Park Lane.’

‘A lady of leisure – with a baby!’ she spluttered.

‘You know what I mean. What do you say, sweetheart? It makes perfect sense, don’t you think?’

She would have gone anywhere in the world with Jack Coltrane even if it made no sense at all. ‘Of course it does.’ She smiled. ‘As soon as we’re married, we’ll go to England.’

The sun was shining brightly enough to crack the pavements, but inside the church it was dark. Light struggled unsuccessfully to penetrate the gloomy stained-glass windows, probably thick with dust and too high to clean.

The young priest looked very serious as he went through the motions of joining Josephine Flynn and Jack Frederick Coltrane together in holy matrimony.

‘For richer, for poorer …’

‘In sickness and in health …’

‘Do you take this woman …?’

‘I do,’ Jack said gravely.

‘Do you take this man …?’

‘I do.’ Josie’s voice was little more than a whisper.

‘I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride.’

‘Hi, there, Mrs Coltrane.’ Jack kissed her warmly on the lips. He looked happy enough, she thought, as if the day had been inevitable since they met. He didn’t
have
to marry her. But he had, whether out of a sense of honour or because he loved her as much as she loved him. The baby chose that moment to give its first, extremely violent kick. She rested her hands on her stomach. She was married. She was Mrs Jack Coltrane, and with that she would have to be content.

As usual, the hall was awash with leaflets and old letters. A few weeks ago, not for the first time, she’d collected everything together, thrown the leaflets away and put the letters in a neat pile on the window-sill in case old tenants returned to see if there’d been any mail, which happened occasionally. Since then the letters had managed to get back on to the floor, and there were more leaflets, dozens of them. No one else living there seemed to give a damn about the state of the hall. There was a notice on the battered pay phone. O
UT OF
O
RDER
.

Josie plodded wearily up to the second floor. The office had been exceptionally busy today. Peter Schofield had wanted an urgent quotation to catch the post, and she’d had no alternative but to stay till half past six because two girls in the typing pool were off.

‘Don’t worry, darling. You’ll find an extra few quid in your wage packet on Friday,’ Peter said. He was very generous. ‘Now you go home to that nice hubby of yours. I’ll post this.’

‘Ta.’ Josie managed to squeeze her face into a tired smile. Peter didn’t know about Laura.

The couple in the first-floor back room were having a fight, screaming at each other at the tops of their voices.
Thank God we don’t live over them, she thought. The man in the room below them made hardly a sound, unlike the young man on the ground floor who had friends round every night and played music till the early hours. The woman in the basement seemed quite respectable, but there was something wrong with her. More than once Josie had heard the sound of desperate weeping coming from the flat. She might have investigated had she not felt much like weeping herself. Jack said the woman’s name was Elsie Forrest. She was a retired nanny, and often admired Laura. There were other tenants she didn’t know – they kept changing all the time.

It was time Mr Browning got someone in to give this place a good scrub. She scowled at the dirt encrusted in the corners of each linoleum-covered stair. And a few repairs wouldn’t have gone amiss. Several bannisters were missing, the light in the hall didn’t work and there was a cracked window in the communal bathroom, where hot water was just a far-off dream. But all Mr Browning was interested in was collecting the rent. Still, he hadn’t turned them away when she was obviously pregnant, like so many other landlords and landladies had done. But, then, Mr Browning didn’t live on the premises, and probably didn’t give a damn if a crying baby disturbed the other residents.

Josie reached the second floor. Before opening the poorly fitting door with gaps top and bottom, she threw back her shoulders and fixed a bright smile on her face. She turned the knob, and went in. ‘Hi,’ she sang out. ‘How’ve things been?’

Jack was pounding away at the typewriter, and Laura was fast asleep in her cot at the foot of the bed. Josie bent over her beautiful six-month-old daughter, half resentful,
half thankful she was asleep. She longed to give her a cuddle, yet ached to sit down and relax with a cup of tea.

‘Everything’s fine, sweetheart.’ Jack abandoned his typing to give her a hug. ‘You’re late. I was getting worried.’

‘I had this quotation to do. I tried to phone, but it’s out of order again.’

‘You can’t hear this far up, anyway, particularly if I’m typing. The kettle’s boiled. Fancy a cuppa?’

‘I’m
dying
for a cuppa.’ She sank thankfully on to the lumpy settee, her head swimming. ‘How’s the play going?’

Jack made a face. ‘Okay, but two came back this morning, one from the Liverpool Playhouse.’ He grinned. ‘Bastards! No loyalty to a fellow scouse.’

She knew the grin was fake, like her smile. Every play he had submitted had been returned – even
The Disciples
, in which he’d had such faith – usually with unfavourable comments. ‘Not tense enough.’ ‘The characters have no depth.’ ‘Where is the plot?’ one director had rudely demanded.

‘Perhaps you’re before your time,’ Josie had suggested once. ‘Like Van Gogh, for example.’

‘Well,’ Jack drawled, ‘let’s hope I don’t have to wait as long as he did, like long after I’m dead.’

He was unhappy in London. He missed his friends and the buzz and excitement of New York. Instead of looking out over a row of busy shops and a cinema, their large, dingy bedsitting-room in a Fulham cul-de-sac was opposite an abandoned factory with smashed windows and graffiti on the walls. Unlike New York, where Jack’s radiance made everything around him seem pale in comparison this ugly room with its bits and pieces of well-used furniture and faded, fraying lino diminished him. He
seemed smaller, slighter, less important, just an ordinary man struggling, unsuccessfully, to make something of himself. Moving to London had been a disastrous mistake.

He brought a mug of tea. ‘I thought I’d send a play to the BBC,’ he said. ‘Bob knows someone who knows someone there. He said they’re always looking for new writers.’

‘It wouldn’t hurt,’ Josie said encouragingly. She didn’t say it would hurt their finances. With ten plays constantly in circulation, the cost of postage both ways, and envelopes and paper, bit deeply into her wages. But the whole point of this very unsatisfactory way of life was so Jack could concentrate on nothing but writing.

During her pregnancy, and for two months after Laura was born, he had worked for a pittance in a pub in Fulham. There had been scarcely enough to pay the rent and buy basic food. Josie didn’t know how she would have managed if Mrs Kavanagh hadn’t sent a huge parcel of baby clothes from Marigold, with a tactful note to say, ‘It seems a shame to let these go to waste. Some haven’t even been worn.’

‘I could kick myself for not staying at college, getting a degree,’ Jack complained frequently. He was completely unskilled. All he knew was bar work.

Josie was the one with a trade, but she hadn’t worked as a shorthand-typist since leaving the insurance company four years ago. When Jack was out, she sharpened her skills by retyping his plays, with the excuse that the manuscripts had got shabby during their constant journeys in the post. As she typed, she had the worrying thought that the plays weren’t very good. They seemed too wordy, rather dull, a bit preachy. Even
The Disciples
, of which he was so proud, had copies of the reviews clipped to the cover, and they weren’t all
that
marvellous.
Only two, from badly printed magazines she’d never heard of, had flattering things to say. When a play was returned with the comment, ‘Where is the plot?’ she couldn’t help but agree.

She brought her shorthand back to speed by taking down the news from the wireless. As soon as she felt up to it, she suggested Jack give up the pub.
She
would work so
he
could write.

‘I can earn more than you. It seems the sensible thing to do.’ It was the hardest decision she had ever made in her life, to desert her lovely baby.

Jack’s reaction still upset her when she thought about it four months later. He had gazed at her wretchedly. His body seemed to shrink before her eyes. ‘Oh, Christ!’ The sound, a mixture of a groan and a cry, seemed to come from the very depths of his being. ‘I’m no good at this.’

Josie felt as if she were shrinking herself, melting away to nothing in the face of his despair. ‘At what?’ she asked shakily.

He gestured round the room. ‘At looking after a wife and kid. It’s not
me
. It’s not what I had planned, at least not until I was
someone
. Back home I was a playwright who worked in a bar to make a few dollars. Now, I’m a fucking
barman
! Sometimes I feel too damn dispirited to write.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Josie said tightly. The doubts she’d had on her wedding day had been confirmed. He hadn’t wanted to marry her. He didn’t want to be a father. He may well love her, and he adored Laura, but both were burdens to this rather splendid, rather immature, intensely good-humoured man. She remembered the first time she’d seen him in the coffee-bar in New York, without a care in the world. That man no longer existed, though he still
put up a front, but now, with his guard down, he looked destroyed.

‘It’s not your fault, sweetheart.’ He dropped his head in his hands and didn’t speak for several seconds. Then he looked at her dully. ‘Look, why don’t I find something else? One of those smart West End places might well snap up a Yankee barman, and if I smile nicely at the customers, I’ll make a load in tips.’

‘You’re not a barman, Jack. You’re a playwright.’ Her voice was sharp. ‘You expected to take London by storm, but maybe the storm’s a long time coming. Oh, does that sound stupid?’

He smiled. ‘A bit.’

‘Anyroad,’ she said seriously, ‘our best plan is for you to concentrate on writing, and
I’ll
work. It shouldn’t be for long. Laura won’t give you any bother. You’ll just need to take her for a little walk around lunchtime, that’s all.’

She would have to stop breast-feeding. That would be the hardest part. She had so much milk, gallons of it, and breast milk was so much healthier for a child. The best times of the day were when she watched her daughter suck furiously on her white, overlarge breasts, sometimes grabbing the flesh with her tiny hands, squeezing it. It was the oddest sensation, almost sensual and at the same time totally natural. Mother and child, joined together, one nourishing the other.

Everything about leaving Laura was hard. On her first day as a secretary with Ashbury Buxton, a civil engineering company in Chelsea, she cried the whole way on the bus. She couldn’t stop thinking about her little daughter.

She’d told all sorts of lies to get the job, apart from the glaring omission that she had a child. She’d been working as a secretary in New York, she told Peter
Schofield, and tried to look confident, at the same time praying he wouldn’t suggest sending for a reference to the mythical company she’d invented. He’d been impressed, didn’t mention a reference and employed her on the spot. There was a good atmosphere in the office, though the work was hard, and there was never time to stop for a chat with the other women.