The Judge's Daughter (4 page)

‘Closing time already?’

‘Closing for good, Pop.’ Like Nan, the Dog and Ferret was about to become just another piece of local history.

They waited for the hearse. Denis, who had been given a day off, was smart in his dark suit and white shirt. He paced about, uncomfortable in new shoes. Outside on the cobbles,
Judge Spencer’s Bentley gleamed in morning sunlight weakened by layers of dust and smoke from nearby mills. The judge had lent his precious motor so that Sadie’s family could travel in
style to church and graveyard.

Denis kept a keen eye on his calm wife. Agnes took things in her stride, but this stride had been a mile long, because she had adored her grandmother. She had no job, little money and the old
man to care for. If only Denis had enjoyed health good enough for a proper job, things would have been different, but he was a manservant on low wages and he hated to see his beloved wife so poor.
Her navy suit was clean and pressed, but shabby shoes told the world how impoverished Agnes was. The new shoes had been for him and should have been for her. His love was so strong that it hurt,
especially now. ‘All right, pet?’ he asked for the third time. The judge had paid for Denis’s shoes – they were part of the uniform.

She smiled at him. Here she sat, surrounded by Nan’s furniture, Nan’s rugs, Nan’s memories expressed in photographs on the mantel. Every pot and pan in the place was
Nan’s, but that lovely woman was dead and Agnes felt numb and chilled right through to her bones. How could a person be cold on a nice June morning? Could she carry on here without the woman
who had formed and nurtured her? Could she live among Nan’s little treasures, those constant reminders of better days?

Pop was quiet. He was scribbling again in his little book, brow furrowed as he struggled with spelling, never one of his strong points. Since the death of Sadie, the notebook had been his
constant companion. Every meal, every walk, every memory got space on the page. He was going to bury his beloved today, and each move would be recorded.

Denis sighed. He knew full well that Fred would make notes through the requiem and at the graveside, but that was the old fellow’s way of coping. If the system worked, it must be employed.
Agnes hadn’t wept properly yet; Denis hoped that this would be her day for tears.

A sudden commotion in the street caused all three occupants of the room to move towards the front door. Hearses were quiet vehicles, but tyres screeched and someone ran quickly down towards
Deane Road. They stood and watched as police dragged Harry Timpson into a car. His mother, turban dangling loose from curlered hair, was screaming and pulling at the nearest officer. ‘Leave
him,’ she yelled. ‘He’s done nowt.’

The drama was over in seconds. As the police car drove off towards town, the hearse entered the other end of the street, moving slowly towards Sadie’s house. It stopped and two men stepped
out to collect the floral tributes and place them on the coffin.

Agnes felt a hand on her arm. She turned and saw a dishevelled Glenys Timpson with a bunch of flowers that had seen better days. The woman was weeping. ‘For your nan. Sadie, God rest
her,’ she sobbed. Then, for the first time within living memory, Glenys apologized. ‘They’ve took him away,’ she added. ‘He’ll be in jail. Seems you were
right.’

Agnes offered a weak smile. ‘It’s a bad day for all of us,’ she said softly. ‘I’ll see you later.’

Fred and his granddaughter occupied the rear seat of the Bentley while Denis drove. Without the chauffeur’s cap, he looked like any other car owner, but the vehicle had to be returned and
garaged by this evening.

There was a large crowd outside the church of Saints Peter and Paul. Sadie Grimshaw had been loved, because she had been a caring, generous woman. The people parted and lined the path they had
created while coffin and chief mourners entered the cool interior of the porch, then the large congregation of neighbours and friends filed quietly into the church. Catholics blessed themselves
after dipping fingers in small fonts of water, Protestants split again into two types – those who tried to copy genuflection and the Sign of the Cross, and those who sat at the back.

It was in here that Agnes allowed everything to become real. In the arms of her loving husband, she poured out the grief she had contained for days made busy with arrangements, with the cashing
of policies and the choosing of hymns. It was a long Mass and, at the end of it, a drained Agnes was helped outside by Fred and Denis. Her eyes moved away from the coffin for a moment and she saw
Glenys Timpson, whose son had been arrested just an hour ago. This street gossip, although living through one of her own darker hours, had come to pay tribute to Sadie Grimshaw.

Glenys smiled through her tears.

Agnes leaned towards her. ‘I didn’t say anything to the police,’ she whispered.

‘I know you didn’t, love.’

The cortège drove through the town into Tonge Cemetery, past the Protestant graves and to the Catholic side in which Fred and Sadie had bought their little bit of England. A gaping hole
was blessed by the priest before Sadie’s coffin was moved for the last time. It was done.

Fred had stopped his writing. He threw soil into the grave, mouthed a few indistinguishable words, then stepped away to make room for Agnes and Denis. The sun shone brilliantly, and happy birds
flitted about in trees and bushes. ‘We can go now,’ said Fred. ‘She’d want us to have a nice cup of tea and a butty.’

People came and went all day. The Noble Street house was filled with neighbours and friends; the priest came, as did a Methodist preacher and two nuns from the Catholic school.

When daylight began to dwindle, Denis took Judge Spencer’s car back to its rightful owner. Sadie’s chair was now occupied by Agnes, just as it had been all through the illness. Fred
scribbled and dozed, Agnes stared into the fire and wondered about her future. Was it time to think about going for a proper job? Pop would recover completely before long, so Agnes would be free to
choose the course of her own future. Her friends would be coming back to sit with her soon and she would discuss the matter with them. Lucy and Mags had got Agnes through this day.

No matter what, it would be lonely without Nan. But Nan would be up in heaven and expecting Agnes to do her best. And Nan always got her own way in the end.

Helen Spencer, a spinster in her thirties, lived a monotonous life in a grand, colourless house that belonged to her father.

Judge Zachary Spencer was a mean-spirited man whose years in the courts had served only to make him bitter about his fellows, and age had not mellowed him. He listened to advocates, heard
testimony, sat on his grand courtroom throne and said very little. Murderers, fraudsters and thieves were part and parcel of his daily grind, and he expected little of his daughter when he arrived
home. She was not a son; she was, therefore, one of the more bitter disappointments in his self-absorbed life.

Control was something he prized above all things, so, apart from the booming works of Wagner and some of Beethoven’s louder compositions, he enjoyed an uneventful life cocooned by domestic
legislation invented and imposed by himself. He seldom spoke except to bark an order and made no attempt to conceal from his daughter the contempt he felt for the merely female. Servants had
disappeared over the years, and the household was held together rather tenuously by one Kate Moores, who owned an admirable ability to ignore her employer.

Helen was lonely to the point of desperation, though she had been careful to hide her discontent with life. Quietly resentful, she attended church, worked in the Bolton Central Library and,
during breaks for coffee and tea, found herself virtually incapable of enjoying conversation with colleagues, so lunchtimes were spent in a quiet, sedate cafe away from crowds and noise. She feared
people and did not trust her own ability to cope in any social situation. Of late, she had begun to quarrel with herself. The steady rock to which she had clung was suddenly embedded in quicksand,
and self-control was becoming a luxury.

Why?
was a question she asked herself repeatedly. Had her mother survived, would life have been different, better? Would siblings have cheered her, or had she been born different from the
norm? Father didn’t help, of course, all noisy music and imperious shouts, but surely other people survived such trials?

An avid reader, she screamed inwardly with Miss Catherine Earnshaw, allowed Heathcliff to break her heart, wept over Jane Eyre and her blinded master, allowed Dickens to place her in the company
of Miss Havisham presiding over an uneaten and decayed wedding breakfast. Helen also laughed when she read, though she seldom even smiled in real life. Fiction had always been a place in which she
might hide, a retreat from a stale, unattractive life.

Until now. He had slid noiselessly into her pale existence, had made her giggle and told her stories of his childhood, of his life at home, of his wife. His wife. Helen poured milk into her tea
and stared blindly through the window. Today he was not here, because he was burying his wife’s grandmother. Denis Makepeace was a quiet man, self-educated, willing and worthy of trust.
Father had lent him the car and the good man was grateful for that. Like Helen, he had to make do with leavings from the top table. He was a servant and she was a woman. Both were treated by
Zachary Spencer as peripheral characters – no, as part of a backdrop created to serve only the judge, who was the main figure on the canvas. Judge Spencer was Henry VIII all over again; Helen
and Denis were two of the crowd to whom he occasionally threw a bone.

Helen Spencer, having never been in love, owned no yardstick against which she might measure her feelings for Denis. Love was in books; it had never figured on the pages of reality. Was the
quickening of her heart a symptom, were the shameful dreams created by genuine affection for him or by the nagging frustrations of a lone, untouched female? Her cheeks were heated as she sipped her
tea, and she wondered whether other women endured such night torments. Of course, she was younger and more beautiful when asleep. Awake, she was plain, ordinary and colourless. No one looked at
her. She stamped books, collected fines, kept the reference section in order. Over the years, Helen had become part of the library, although she was not worth reading, so she remained on the
shelf.

The mirror over the mantel told its familiar story – brown hair, hazel eyes, pale skin, nothing remarkable about the face. She was neither fat nor thin, yet her body had no real shape and
she had never sought to embellish her physical self. Would she actually use the frivolous purchases she had made and could she change herself gradually in order to avoid comments from her father
and work fellows? Suddenly giddy and young, she was about to embark on an adventure usually enjoyed by females half her age.

She took herself off to the privacy of her bedroom where, once seated on the bed, she began to unwrap the evidence of her folly. Silk slid through her fingers, soft, smooth undergarments in many
shades – including black. Patent leather shoes and matching handbag were placed carefully in a wardrobe beneath a hanger bearing a fine wool suit in emerald green. Blouses and skirts remained
in their packages, because she had more interesting objects to investigate.

Across the surface of the dressing table, Helen set out her stall. The girl in the department store had been patient and friendly, had shown the nervous customer how to attain a daytime
‘natural’ look, how to make herself up for the evenings. Evenings? Where on earth would she go and with whom? The Halle Orchestra in Manchester, perhaps? Concerts in the Free Trade
Hall, a single ticket to the theatre, a lone seat in the cinema? There was nowhere to go, because she was nobody; perhaps, if she became a somebody, things might begin to happen.

Darnley’s Liquid Satin foundation, compressed powder, four lipsticks, half a dozen eye shadows, an eyebrow pencil, mascara – did she dare? A small phial of Chanel No. 5 had taken a
fortnight’s wages, while the rest of the articles had cost a king’s ransom. Did she dare? Would she ever obtain the courage required?

There was an anger in Helen, a deep resentment that, since childhood, had been forbidden to show its face at the surface. It had bubbled up recently in reaction to a small event, a comment made
by a child in the library. The little girl had remarked to her mother that the lady had an unhappy face, and this same unhappy-faced lady had gone that very lunchtime for a make-up demonstration in
a store. Perhaps she could not change her soul – no one had the power to alter the past – but she might make some attempt to reshape her future. Yet she had cleansed herself after the
event, had removed from her face all evidence of the effort made by the gentle girl who had tried to help.

Now, she unveiled cleanser, moisturizer, a tiny pot of cream for delicate areas around the eyes. Pearl nail polishes in pink and white were lined up in front of other bottles and boxes. Like a
man playing soldiers, Helen assembled her troops in preparation for battle. It would have to be done gradually, but she intended to make the most of her minimal assets. Other women wore make-up and
perfume, so why should she be the exception?

The car purred its way into the drive and she leapt up. Father was away in London for a few days, yet Denis had been ordered to garage the vehicle after the funeral. Father did not trust the
people of Noble Street to treat his precious Bentley with the reverence it warranted.

She peeped round the edge of a curtain and watched Denis. He was an excellent man, a reader, an interesting teller of tales. He was the one who had awoken her inner self, who had reminded her
that she was a woman with real needs and desires. She could not have him; he belonged with another woman, but he might, perhaps, bring her out of herself and help her across stepping stones between
her own silent world and normality. Denis listened. She had never been a great talker, but he encouraged her to speak out. One of Nature’s gentlemen, Denis Makepeace was Helen’s only
friend.