The Leaving Of Liverpool (11 page)

‘Then we shall eat immediately.’ Levon Zarian removed his cap and jacket and put them in the lobby cupboard. His own hair was just as black and lustrous, if considerably shorter. ‘Where’s Tamara?’

‘In the kitchen, getting things ready. I’ve been helping. We’re having wine, red, and there’s coffee ice cream in the ice box.’

He smiled - Anne always made him smile. ‘Is there a reason for this feast? Or are we just celebrating the fact it’s Tuesday, the sun is out, and the trees in Central Park are in full bloom? I passed today and it looked lovely. We must go there for a walk one day soon.’

‘I don’t think we’re celebrating anything, Lev.’ She hung on to his arm when he went into the kitchen where Tamara was preparing a salad.

‘Hello, my love.’ He rubbed his cheek against her smooth one and she kissed his nose. Tall and queenly, with plaits wound around her well-shaped head, to him she always seemed out of place in a kitchen. In Armenia, servants had done everything for them. ‘Are you all right?’ She looked rather strained, he thought.

‘Something’s happened, I’ll tell you later.’ Her eyes flickered towards Anne, who was attempting to uncork the wine.

Levon’s stomach lurched. ‘Does it mean we might lose her?’ he enquired in their old language.

‘No, and please speak English, Lev,’ Tamara whispered, ‘otherwise you’ll frighten her.’

Neither could understand why Anne’s face froze and she ran from the room when sometimes, inadvertently, they addressed each other in a foreign tongue. Perhaps she felt shut out or scared by something she didn’t understand.

‘Lev will see to the wine, darling,’ she said. He saw that Anne’s efforts were taking pieces out of the cork. ‘You set the table. I’ve nearly finished the salad.’

They ate in the small dining room, the sinking sun illuminating the room like a stage set. It was a cheerful meal, gay and full of laughter, so different from the meals eaten in the same room before Anne had arrived to bless their lives with her vivid smile and delightful presence.

It was three months since he’d found her and he found it unbelievable how quickly she’d settled in. Within the space of a day or two, she had begun to talk in a strong Irish accent, not about the past, but the present. She seemed to accept him and Tamara without question, calling them by their first names, as if she’d known them all her life. Levon realized that her brain wasn’t wholly sound: no normal girl would behave the way she did.

Tamara thought she was hiding from something. ‘What?’ Levon had asked.

‘How should I know, Lev? She shows no sign of being homesick: she isn’t missing anybody. She never talks about her past, yet she must have one. I think she feels safe with us: she knows we’ll never harm her.’

Tamara was a new woman nowadays. She taught Anne the songs she’d sung at weddings back in Armenia, translating the words, bought her clothes, ornaments, ribbons for her long hair, purses, and pretty shoes. And she bought clothes for herself: lacy blouses and skirts, not as short as the latest fashion - Tamara wouldn’t dream of showing her knees - a hat made entirely of pink velvet petals to frame the aristocratic face that now seemed miraculously free of careworn lines.

Anne had been there barely a fortnight when she’d asked for a drawing pad and pencil. Tamara, always willing to indulge her every whim, rushed out and bought them. When he came home, she showed him the drawing Anne had done: a small grinning boy in a nightshirt with a candleholder in his hand.

‘She said his name is Aidan.’ They had studied the drawing, not speaking. ‘It might be her brother,’ Tamara had said eventually.

‘I wonder if he’s missing his sister?’ For the first time, Levon felt a sense of guilt. It had been rash and utterly irresponsible to virtually kidnap the girl off the streets. He’d told himself he was rescuing her from the people who’d been careless enough to put her in a taxi to be delivered like a parcel to an address where no one was in. He couldn’t have just
left
her there to wait for someone who might never come.
That
would have been even more irresponsible.

The day after the drawing, he’d said nothing to Tamara, but had taken it with him when he went to collect the taxi from the depot, written a message on the back, and put it through the letterbox of 88 Bleecker Street. If someone were worried, it would reassure them that Anne was safe.

Since then, she’d drawn more pictures: another boy older than the first whose name was Thaddy; a sad-eyed girl called Mollie; a young man named Finn; a woman of about Tamara’s age who appeared to be seated on a cloud. Tamara, who seemed attuned to the girl’s every mood, deduced that this was her mother and she was dead. ‘The cloud means she’s in heaven,’ she explained.

One morning, she’d taken Anne to Mulberry Street market on the Lower East Side where there was a stall that sold Italian lace. The minute they got off the bus, they’d come across a man savagely whipping an old, ailing horse that was attempting to pull a cart heaped with sacks. Anne had been so distressed that they had returned straight home. That afternoon, she’d drawn the face of a black-eyed man with heavy eyebrows and lips twisted in a sneer. ‘She even drew horns on his head,’ Tamara had told Levon, shocked. ‘At the bottom, she wrote “The Doctor”.’

‘Where is the picture?’ Levon had asked.

‘She ripped it to pieces, very slowly and deliberately, then threw it in the trash. Something bad has happened to her, Lev. I’m convinced of it.’

 

The meal over, Tamara and Anne cleared the table and went into the sitting room to play records on the phonograph, while Levon stayed at the table to study for the Bar exam. He would be relieved when he was able to practise law in America and no longer had to drive a taxi, something he did more to pass the time than for the money. He was already a moderately wealthy man, and had managed to bring his small fortune with him, if not the rich contents of his house in Armenia. Not that
things
, however beautiful and finely crafted, mattered after they’d lost their beloved Larisa.

The strains of Tchaikovsky’s
Nutcracker Suite
drifted into the room. He bent his head over his work until, a few minutes later, Tamara came in and sat at the table with him. He laid down his pen, remembering she had something to tell him.

‘Anne is dancing,’ she said. ‘She makes up the steps as she goes along. She gets quite lost in it.’

‘Perhaps we should send her to a stage school,’ Levon suggested, ‘where she can learn to sing and dance professionally?’

‘That’s a good idea, Lev, but not just yet.’ She played with the earring in her left ear, a sign she had something important to say. ‘I took Anne to the doctor’s this morning,’ she said in her mother tongue. ‘She needed more drops for her heart.’ It was Tamara who’d noticed the girl’s heart beat unevenly on occasions. The doctor had prescribed a drug called digitalis. ‘It’s nothing serious, but it’s best to be safe than sorry. Just give her five drops a day on her tongue,’ he’d said.

‘Is she all right?’ Levon asked now, alarmed.

‘Fine, Lev, but there’s just one thing: I thought Anne had yet to start having periods, but that’s not the case at all. She doesn’t have them because she’s pregnant.’ She laid her hand on his arm. ‘Lev, darling, Anne is expecting a child.’

 

There’d been poor people in Duneathly, farm workers mostly, who lived in shacks on the farmers’ land. They weren’t seen all that often in the village. They had no need of solicitors, banks, or dress shops. Occasionally, they might call out the doctor, but doctors didn’t work for free and it had to be a real emergency. The women sometimes went to the butcher’s just before it closed to buy bones for a stew that would last all week, and the men packed into O’Reilly’s pub on Friday night after they’d been paid. Mollie had been woken from her sleep many times by the sound of a desperate row going on outside. A woman would be dragging her husband out of the pub screaming, ‘Before you spend every penny of your wages on the ale and leave your kids to starve, you flamin’ eejit!’

In Liverpool, there was Mrs Brophy, in her fine four-bedroom house with a big garden, struggling to keep her head above water until she and all her girls were at work and the money would come pouring in. At least Mrs Brophy was in a position to have dreams. For some people, life was truly hopeless.

Mollie realized this for the first time when Tom Ryan took her home to meet his mother. Irene Ryan’s house was spotless, the windows shone, the step was scrubbed, and there was food in the larder. The house stood out from its dreary, filthy neighbours in Turnpike Street off Scotland Road where Tom and his three brothers had been born and where scores of sickly, half-starved children played in the cobbled street dressed in little more than rags. Most were barefoot. Mollie couldn’t believe such poverty existed in a big, vigorous city like Liverpool.

The reason for Mrs Ryan’s affluence was due entirely to the generosity of her four sons, who had all passed the scholarship and had good, well-paying jobs. Mike, the eldest, worked as a supervisor in the post office in Moorfields, Brian was traffic manager for the Liverpool Tool Company, and Enoch had served his apprenticeship as a carpenter and now had his own little furniture business, which was doing extremely well. Mrs Ryan showed Mollie two chairs he’d made with lovely carved backs and curved arms. And then there was Tom, a policeman, though Mrs Ryan had wanted him to become a priest.

‘I always fancied having a priest in the family,’ she sighed when she and Mollie first met.

Tom had winked at Mollie from behind his mother’s back. ‘I’d’ve made a hopeless priest, Ma, and I’d never have learned the Latin.’

‘You can do anything if you try hard enough,’ his mother said severely.

Tom told Mollie later that this phrase had been drummed into him for as long as he could remember. ‘She said the same to all of us: “You can do anything if you try.” She used to get books out the library and help us with our schoolwork so we were always top of the class in everything,’ he said proudly. ‘Ma was determined we’d all get good jobs, not go on the parish like the rest of the lads in Turnpike Street. After our dad died not long after I was born, she used to take me cleaning with her, and she took in washing an’ all. Night-times, she worked in a pub on Scottie Road and our Mike looked after me.’

Irene Ryan was a small, knobbly woman who walked with a slight limp. Her hands were red and swollen and her back was hunched as a result of a lifetime of hard work. It was hard to believe she’d given birth to four strapping lads. A photograph of them stood on the sideboard, taken the day Tom had become a fully-fledged policeman, their little tough mother in the centre, wearing the beaver lamb fur coat that was her pride and joy. The lads had clubbed together and presented it to her on her fiftieth birthday.

They thought the world of their mam, who had encouraged them to dream and impressed on them they could do anything they wanted if they tried hard enough. They took turns sending money every week because it only seemed fair. If it hadn’t been for Mam, they wouldn’t be where they were today, but standing on street corners playing pitch and toss or hanging around the Docks or St John’s Market in the hope of getting a few hours’ work, while their wives and kids had to rely on charity for food.

Tom was the only son still single, but only until Mollie’s birthday came along in July when she would become seventeen and a married woman, both on the same day. She was looking forward to it because she liked Tom very much and he made her laugh - there hadn’t been much to laugh at in Duneathly over the last few years. And Tom loved her so wholeheartedly that it would be a shame to throw it back in his face because she doubted if a love like his came along twice in a woman’s life.

She’d left the Brophys months ago and now lived with Tom’s mother in the little house in Turnpike Street, sleeping in the same feather bed where Tom had slept when he was little - she could have sworn she could smell the fresh, tingling soap he used whenever her head touched the pillow. He was in a hostel where all the young, single policemen lived until they found themselves a wife. Once they were married, they would be given a police house. Tom didn’t know yet where it would be.

Mollie couldn’t wait.

‘Morning, luv,’ Mrs Ryan grunted when she limped into Mollie’s room with a cup of tea, as she did every morning.

‘Morning, Irene.’ Mollie struggled to a sitting position. She’d been told to call her future mother-in-law by her first name, as it sounded friendlier.

‘It’s a lovely day outside,’ Irene remarked, pulling back the curtains and allowing the golden sunshine to come pouring in. It was May and unseasonably warm for the time of year.

‘I wish you wouldn’t do this, you know,’ Mollie said uncomfortably. ‘I mean, it should be
me
bringing
you
tea, not the other way around.’

‘No, it shouldn’t, luv. Me, I’m a lady of leisure these days and I don’t have much to do with me time.’ Her prematurely wizened face split into a grin. ‘Anyroad, you’re a doctor’s girl: you’re probably used to being waited on.’