The Past and Other Lies (28 page)

Yes, that was it, thought Bertha; Mr Hobbs getting some big score or other. Then she looked carefully at Matthew, not having realised before that he was a cricket follower. Dad, of course, detested cricket. It was a game for Eton schoolboys, or something like that.

Silence fell once more and Bertha’s heart raced anxiously. Where on earth were Jemima and Ronnie?

‘Here we are, a nice bit of tea,’ said Mum, carrying the tray into the lounge, and Bertha leapt up to help her. The next few minutes were filled with the normal questions and thankyous of polite company at Sunday afternoon tea, but all too soon the four of them were seated with cups of tea at their elbows and plates of sardine sandwiches on their laps and only the weather left to debate. It was quarter past four—surely Jemima was on her way?

‘You are knitting baby clothes, Mrs Flaxheed. Is there a happy event on the horizon?’

Horror of horrors! Bertha froze, the sardine sandwich dissolving to dust on her tongue, and her eyes flew to her mother, who had flushed red and seemed frozen in horrified inaction. Dad was expressionless but for a twitching of a muscle in his jaw.

‘Dad, Matthew and I have some news,’ said Bertha, smiling grimly and turning to include Matthew in her announcement. Matthew hastily put down his plate and scrambled to his feet. ‘Yes, yes, so we have. Indeed, we do. We...’ He turned to her, then back to Dad. Mum appeared to be redundant in this conversation. ‘I have asked Miss Flaxheed, Bertha, to be my wife and she has done me the honour of consenting.’

There, it was out. There was no going back, there need be no more silences, no more raised eyebrows or flaring nostrils, it was done and she was officially engaged. All they needed was to await the congratulations.

But the front door was at that moment flung open and there were hurried footsteps in the hallway.

‘Alright, we’re here at last. Don’t fuss, Mum. Ronnie had some piano recital thing on and I don’t know what else. Anyway, it doesn’t matter because we’re here now and we’ve got news, so you’d better stop what you’re doing and listen!’

And here was Jemima marching into the lounge, plonking herself down on the settee with Ronnie bringing up the rear, suddenly remembering to remove his hat.

‘Give me a kiss, Mum, as we shall be having a baby! What do you think of that? Well, aren’t you going to congratulate me?’

MAY 1926

T
HE BABY WAS THREE months old and so far all it had done was cry, soil its nappy, dribble and vomit, and sometimes it did all those things at once.

Jemima kicked the kitchen door shut and clamped her hands over her ears. But the miserable flat that she and Ronnie lived in was so poky and cramped it was impossible to block any sound out at all no matter where you were or how many doors you slammed.

The baby paused, hiccoughed and let out a louder yell.

What was wrong with it? She had fed it, changed it, turned it over. She had even held the rotten little thing in her arms and paced up and down the hallway to calm it down but even that had only stopped it for five minutes.

‘
Stop
it! Stop
crying!
’ she ordered, but that only caused it to cry more.

It had cried all last night from the moment she had put it down to the moment when Ronnie had noisily let himself in, sometime after midnight, and then it had cried until he had left again for work this morning.

It was the Union. The Union and their stupid threats of a big important strike. A pathetic, pointless waste-of-everybody’s-time strike, a strike that wasn’t ever going to happen. And Ronnie was coming home after midnight because of it and leaving her alone with this...this...this
crying
thing. Coming home at all hours, full to bursting with this resolution and that demand and the stupid government saying this and the even more stupid Union saying something else and what did it matter anyway when everyone knew, they all
knew
—except Ronnie and his stupid little league—that there wasn’t going to
be
a strike tomorrow or the next day or next week or next year, and in the meantime here she was all alone with the baby crying day after day after day and driving her to distraction.

‘
STOP! Stop crying!
’ she shouted, hands over her ears, but the crying continued and she flung open the door and marched into the hallway and into the baby’s tiny boxroom. When she saw it lying there, so small and helpless and red-faced and wretched, she wanted to pick it up and shake it and shake it until it stopped.

It had looked so sweet, so small and vulnerable, she remembered, the first few days after it was born; sort of tawny and downy, like a little chick. Her heart had melted. Its face and hands and feet so tiny you wondered how they could possibly work. But work they did, and soon the face was screwed up in rage and the hands and feet plucking at the blanket and grabbing at everything and the downiness and the tawniness, which was just a touch of jaundice, had faded to a bald pink. Not a chick, a monster.

She turned and fled back to the hallway and into the mean little lounge, but the sight of the mean little dining table with the three mean-looking, mismatched chairs and the patched and overstuffed settee left over from the previous tenant and the single bookshelf donated by Dad and the horrible, ugly dresser (a present from Clive and Rose in Camberwell) that looked as though it belonged in some other century made her want to shout again, louder, and she returned to the kitchen.

It was the second day of May, a promisingly warm spring Sunday that had turned into a damp spring evening, and now the kitchen was as chilly as an icebox in January.

It was 1926—
1926
!—and most houses, certainly most houses in Acton, had gas cookers, but not Mr and Mrs Ronnie Booth, oh no! They had a range, a solid fuel range that you had to kick into action first thing in the morning when it was still dark outside, then feed constantly with coal or wood to prevent it dying. Other people—people who lived in Maida Vale and Kensington and whose husbands wore suits and bowlers and worked in the City—had machines that did their washing for them. Or, rather, their maids had machines to do the washing for them. Their wives no longer had to sit in front of the tub and scrub for a whole morning then drag everything downstairs to the yard to put it through the wringer and hang it, still sodden, on the line just in time for a downpour. But it was laughable to think of Ronnie ever buying such a machine for her. And laughable that she, Jemima Flaxheed, late of the tearoom of Gossup and Batch of Regent Street, should actually desire one!

She let out an abrupt laugh and for a moment, in the other room, the baby paused in surprise, then, with a deep breath, it started up again.

So this is it, thought Jemima, her hands still pressed to her ears, this was her lot: to feed the baby one minute and the range the next; to scrub Ronnie’s dirty clothes with her bare hands and hump great loads of washing up and down the stairs; to spend all afternoon making tea then all evening cleaning it up again in that dirty, cracked enamel sink; to heave Mum’s old black perambulator up and down the stairs each time she took Baby outside and, when she had the bright idea of leaving the wretched perambulator in the downstairs porch in the yard, to have Mr Parson the butcher tell her to move it and get angry when she refused.

And that was another thing, they were living above a shop! A
butcher’s
shop! Parson’s in High Street, a place you never went to unless you were living on charity because the cuts were small and sometimes the meat wasn’t fresh and here they were
living over it!
As if the baby’s crying wasn’t enough to send you to a madhouse, at five o’clock every morning except Sundays they were woken by the delivery van and the sawing of bones. Every morning,
saw saw saw
, enough to set your teeth on edge—and after having to go through all that you’d think old Parson, the stingy old miser, would at least have the decency to give you a bit of shoulder or a spare chop or something but no, all you got from him were demands to move your perambulator. Well, she was
damned
if she was going to move her perambulator for anyone, let alone him. The old sod could just step around it and no matter if he did bang into it all the time.

The back window was open and even though it was Sunday and Parson’s was shut on Sundays, a sudden waft of sawdust and raw meat seeped into the flat.

What kind of a man brought his wife to live
here
?

The kind of man who thought more of his comrades in the league than he did of his own wife, who cared more for some unknown miner’s family in Worksop than he did for his own family right here in Acton. Lord knew, she didn’t need a big house; a poky terrace would do; a two-up, two-down with a parcel of yard out the front and a WC out the back would do. It wasn’t much to ask, was it? And they could rent at first, couldn’t they? But oh, no! While other wives lived in comfort with gas cookers and washing machines, she was meant to be content with this mean little one-and-a-half-bedroom flat above Parson’s.

Bertha, meanwhile, was queening it in a three-bedroom house with a garden and rosebushes in Oakton Way.

In the other room the baby gulped, choked, and fell silent.

Jemima held her breath and stood motionless, her heart thudding noisily.

With a little cough the baby began to grizzle once more.

The creamy-coloured peeling wallpaper that covered the walls began to turn a violent red colour and a pulse started throbbing in her forehead. She couldn’t remember getting up but now, somehow, she was standing in the hallway, the blood hurtling through her body so that her arms ached and her fingers clenched the air. But her body had nothing to do and nowhere to go except out into the yard to rescue the washing off the line.

She would go outside. She would rescue the washing off the line.

But it had been spitting all evening and the washing, she knew, would already be wet through. And anyway there was another pile of nappies to wash and Ronnie’s work clothes still not dry for tomorrow though she had washed them on Thursday. Perhaps it would be a good thing if there was a strike because then she wouldn’t have to wash his work clothes, but then she remembered the schools weren’t going on strike no matter what happened with the government so really there was no escape.

No escape at all.

She flung open the door to the flat and stepped, stumbled, down the cold concrete steps to the downstairs door, which was permanently ajar because the hinges were rusted. She tugged open the door and pushed the huge old black perambulator out of the way and stood in the yard, breathing deeply.

Breathing deeply.

The rain sprayed a fine mist onto her face and it felt cool and calming and she liked the way her hair grew damp and heavy and had that wet hair smell about it, and how her dress clung to her legs and the drops dribbled down her arms and along her fingers and hung in droplets at her fingertips before sliding off and splashing on the muddy yard beneath her feet.

She smiled. She thought about laughing out loud but there was no one to hear, Parson’s being closed on a Sunday and the shop empty and silent for once. The smell of sawdust and raw meat still lingered. It had begun to seem like there would never be a time when she couldn’t smell sawdust and raw meat.

She would go out for a walk. No matter about Baby, Baby never noticed if you were there or not, except when it was hungry or needed changing, and even then you never knew if it realised it had been fed or changed or not. What did it matter if you went out on your own and left Baby asleep while you did the shopping or went to the park or looked at the fashions in the shop windows? Baby had never come to any harm and it was ridiculous to be tied to the house like a slave when your husband was at work every day, or out at yet another pointless rally, and only took Baby out in the perambulator on a Sunday afternoon for all the world to see what a wonderful dad he was. Oh yes, a wonderful dad—didn’t they all say so? And she, stuck indoors like a slave.

Like a prisoner.

The rain eased a little and she looked up at the grey dusk and wondered when Ronnie would deign to come home. He had come home late nearly every night of the last week filled with all the news as though what Mr Baldwin said and what the government did or what the union demanded could have anything to do with them. With her. And now someone was on strike—the coalminers, no doubt; it was always the coalminers—and you’d think that would be an end to it, but no! Now they were saying it’s a general strike or revolution! And what did they think that would accomplish? she had asked. Did he think the Russians were better off now than before?

So they had fought and Ronnie had gone out. Although there had been more to it than just the Russians.

Baby had stopped. Jemima cocked an ear in the rain and listened. There was traffic in High Street, she could hear the splash of tyres as a bus passed by and in the distance the bells of All Saints calling people to Evensong. They would get a good turnout tonight, despite the rain, because people were eager to hear the latest about whether there really was to be a strike or not in the morning.