Queen of the Mersey (62 page)

The sorting office in Southport promised to send someone to look for Ned and tell him to go straight to the hospital. ‘And let him know Queenie’s looking after his little boy.’ Roddy’s secretary said he wasn’t in his office. He’d gone to a meeting. ‘As soon as he comes back, please tell him to ring his daughter’s house. Have you got the number?’

‘Is it the same number as his old one?’

‘Of course it is. I’d forgotten he used to live here.’

Although Roddy had left the furniture behind, the room had changed drastically since he’d gone. The chintz covers and pastel curtains had been replaced with material of a more lurid design; a mishmash of dark, jewel colours. Even more lurid paintings hung on the walls. Queenie had tried to make sense of them, but failed. A massive fish, about four feet long, made from driftwood, so she’d been informed, adorned the wall over the mantelpiece, itself containing three small items of sculpture that made even less sense than the paintings.

‘Am I getting old?’ she asked Evan, but didn’t get a reply; he was fast asleep, his little fat chin buried in his chest. His cup had fallen on the floor and tea had leaked on to the carpet. She took it into the kitchen, washed it, and returned with a paper towel to mop up the stain, feeling it was important to keep busy. The stain gone, she went upstairs, removed the bloodstained bedding, put it in the washing machine, then laid fresh sheets on the bed.

Hester would have reached the hospital in Southport by now. She phoned to ask how she was. ‘It’s too early to say,’ she was told.

‘Has her husband arrived yet?’

‘Not yet, no.’

‘Will you tell her he’s on his way?’

It suddenly struck her that there might be something seriously wrong with Hester, but comforted herself with the thought that it was most unlikely. Women didn’t die in childbirth these days, though she might lose the baby.

Her own baby had been lost before it had time properly to form. She sat down and stared at Evan, snoring slightly in his bouncy chair. It was impossible to visualise having once had a much tinier version of Evan in her womb.

The phone went and she jumped. It was Ned. He’d just got to the hospital, but hadn’t been allowed to see Hester. ‘It’s something to do with the placenta. I’m dead worried, Queenie.’

‘I know it’s difficult, but try not to worry.’

‘Is Evan all right?’

‘He’s fine, Ned, fast asleep. You just concentrate on Hester. Let us know when there’s any news.’

Five minutes later, the phone rang again. This time it was Roddy, surprised to hear her voice when he’d been expecting Hester to answer.

She told him what had happened and he said he’d leave there and then. ‘But should I come there or go to the hospital?’ He sounded as worried as Ned.

Queenie wasn’t sure. ‘I don’t know if Ned would want an anxious father-in-law for company. You might make each other worse.’

‘Then I’ll come to Crosby.’

He arrived much quicker than expected. She was nursing Evan who’d woken up in a funny mood. Perhaps he was expecting to find his mummy or daddy there. ‘I drove like the wind,’ Roddy explained. His face was haggard with worry. ‘Has there been any word from Ned?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Lord, I’m glad you’re here.’ He took her and the baby in his arms. ‘I don’t know if I could cope if anything happened to Hester.’

‘I don’t think there’s much chance of that,’ she said soothingly. ‘Here, hold your grandson. I’m about to make him something to eat. I hope the directions are on the tin. I’ve never done this before.’ If the circumstances had been different, she would have enjoyed herself today.

Ned rang while she was in the kitchen. Glancing at her watch, she was surprised to find it was five o’clock. ‘Hester’s about to have a Caesarean section,’ Ned said. ‘Apparently, the placenta was blocking her vagina and she couldn’t give birth naturally. As the baby was due in four weeks, the doctor said it would be safer to remove it now.’ His voice was very wobbly. ‘I hope that all makes sense, Queenie.’

‘Perfect sense. Roddy’s here. Would you like him to come and wait with you?’

‘I’d sooner pace the corridors by meself, thanks all the same. I’ve got some hash with me. Every now and then I go outside and have a spliff. I doubt if Roddy would approve.’

‘I doubt if the hospital would, either,’ she said with a smile. ‘There’s just one thing, Ned, before you ring off. How much of the tin does Evan have to eat?’

‘All of a main meal and half a tin of vegetables. Lamb stew is his favourite.

Hester won’t let him be a vegetarian until he can make the choice himself.’

‘Is that good or bad?’ Roddy asked anxiously when she told him the news about Hester.

‘Good. They’ve found out what’s wrong and they’re going to put it right. I don’t know how long it will take. The operation hasn’t started yet.’

Between them, it took half an hour to feed Evan. Roddy held him on his knee, while Queenie tried to spoon lamb stew and grated carrot into his mouth, watching despairingly as he let it dribble out. She scraped the food off his chin and spooned it back again. The baby’s eyes danced. This seemed to be a game; he was willing to swallow it the second time.

‘He needs to be force fed,’ Roddy groaned. ‘I’ve got stew all over my trousers.’

‘You should have put a towel over them, though that’s easily said with hindsight. Should we bath him?’

‘I suppose we’d better, but let the little bugger’s food go down first.’

An hour later, Roddy laid a sleepy, shiningly clean Evan in his cot. They both watched as the baby’s eyes began to close and soon he was sleeping peacefully.

‘He looks deceptively angelic,’ Roddy whispered. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up and the front was soaked after their ordeal in the bathroom. ‘No one would guess what a little horror he is when he’s awake. I wonder what Gus was like at this age? I never saw him until he was four.’

‘Gus was a little horror too, into everything. We had to keep things on top of the wardrobe out of his way.’ She took a last look at Evan and said, ‘I’ll clean the bathroom. You’d think we’d just bathed a herd of elephants in there.’

‘I’ll make some tea. I wonder if there’s anything stronger on the premises? I could do with a stiff drink.’

When Queenie went down, Roddy was prowling the room. He stopped to examine the books on the shelf beside the fireplace. His own books and clothes were the only things he’d taken with him to his flat. Now the shelves were crammed with paperback novels, books on a wide variety of subjects, including many on politics. They all looked tatty and well-used. The curtains were drawn and the wall lights had been switched on. The old glass globes had been replaced with more colourful shades shaped like Chinese lanterns. More coal had been put on the fire.

‘I’ve brought you one of Ned’s shirts,’ she said. ‘It’s not exactly your usual style.’ She held up a pink cheesecloth shirt without a collar. ‘You’d better put it on and I’ll hang the wet one in the airing cupboard, otherwise, you’ll get a cold.’

Roddy grinned. ‘It’s nice, being fussed over for a change.’

‘What’s that you’re drinking?’

‘Coconut rum. It’s rather sickly, but it’s all I could find. Tea’s made in the kitchen. What have Hester and Ned done to my house, Queenie?’ he asked plaintively. ‘It looks like a bordello.’

‘I’ve never been in a bordello, so wouldn’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘I like it. I suppose they’re just expressing their personality.’

‘Ned’s, more like. Remember how it was before Ned got his hands on it? What does that say about my personality? I must be very insipid.’

‘Don’t be daft. Most men aren’t interested in decoration. Ned’s rather unusual.’

‘You can say that again.’ He returned to examining the books and Queenie went into the kitchen to get the tea. She opened the fridge and looked at the contents. The last meal she’d had was breakfast and she was hungry now that she felt that Hester was going to be all right; loads of women had Caesareans. There were two rissole things – nut cutlets? – that had no doubt been for that night’s tea. She was about to hunt for a frying pan, but thought she’d better check first that Roddy was hungry too.

‘Do you fancy a nut rissole? What on earth’s the matter?’

Roddy had taken a book from the shelf and was staring at it fixedly, his eyes unnaturally bright. ‘Years ago,’ he said hoarsely, ‘when I first met Laura, we used to exchange messages in this book – not this one, another edition. I bought this when I came back after the war. Laura must have had it in her room and Hester or Ned found it and put it on the shelf. It’s still got a note from me in the front. I daren’t read it.’

‘It doesn’t matter what the note says, Roddy,’ she said softly. ‘It’s a long time since it was written.’

‘But I want to know,’ he said stubbornly, ‘Yet I daren’t read it.’

‘Give it here.’

He meekly handed her the book. It was bound in green leather and the title was The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. The author was Edward Gibbons.

‘Laura told me about this book,’ she said. ‘She said you’d bought a copy.’ She flicked through the pages and at the very front found a piece of folded notepaper, yellow with age. The paper was thin and through it she could recognise Roddy’s bold handwriting. ‘Can I read it? I won’t read aloud.’

He nodded jerkily, like a puppet. ‘Please.’

My darling, darling Lo, she read, I love you totally, endlessly, eternally, for ever and ever and ever. Your totally, endlessly, eternally devoted husband, Roddy

‘It’s a love letter,’ she said calmly. ‘It’s the sort of thing I might have written to Theo, or he to me. It’s what thousands, millions, of husbands, wives and lovers could write to each other. You loved Laura, I loved Theo, but now they’re dead and we have each other. I remember you saying more or less the same thing to me.’ She crumpled the note into a ball and threw it on the fire.

‘Why did you do that?’ He looked at her, horrified.

‘Because you wrote it twenty, thirty years ago. What it says doesn’t matter any more.’

‘It’s easy for you, your conscience is clear.’ His face was sullen, and his voice, too.

‘We all look back and are sorry we didn’t behave better, were kinder and more considerate.’

‘You don’t know what I did.’

‘You’ve told me what you did, and it didn’t sound all that terrible to me.’

‘I didn’t tell you everything.’ He sat in the corner of the settee, all hunched up, as if trying to make himself smaller. ‘The day Laura killed herself, she was following my instructions. I told her to do it.’

‘But you didn’t mean it!’

‘Oh, but I did,’ he said passionately, suddenly coming to life. ‘I meant every word. She’d been making our lives hell for years. She bore no relationship to the woman I’d fallen in love with, married. She’d become a stranger. Hester had wanted to go back to America, but was still here, years later, looking after her mother. Agnes was a great help, but she was only here a few hours a day. Laura and I slept in separate rooms, hardly spoke to each other, except when she was depressed and would threaten to kill herself. It would take hours to calm her.’

He was talking faster, almost gabbling. ‘Some days she wasn’t so bad. She sewed things, cooked a lot, but even on the good days, we could never leave her alone in the house, her mood swings were too unpredictable, and she refused to set a foot outside. We were like prisoners.’ His face was clouded with bad memories.

‘Sometimes, I’d hear her sobbing in the middle of the night. After a while, I stopped going in. I pulled the clothes over my head to shut out the sound. Then one morning she said she wanted to die, life wasn’t worth living. It was the same old stuff I’d heard dozens, hundreds, of times before. She was in bed. I’d just popped my head around the door to say I was off to work, Hester was downstairs. At that moment, I think I wanted to die myself. I just couldn’t take any more. I said, “So die! Kill yourself, then we’ll all be happy.” Then I slammed the door and went to the office. That afternoon, Hester phoned to say she was dead.’ He began to cry. ‘It was all my fault, Queenie. I may as well have cut her wrists myself.’

‘Darling!’ She sat beside him on the settee. ‘You were at the end of your tether. Loads of people would have done the same.’

‘Would you?’ He looked at her tearfully.

‘I’ve no idea how I would have acted in a similar situation. None of us do until we’re faced with it.’

‘I don’t deserve to be happy.’

‘You deserve it more than most,’ she soothed. ‘You put up with so much.’

‘I should have let her go into a home, but this was Laura, Queenie. Laura!’ His eyes were two holes of despair. ‘Remember how she was in Glover Street? I kept thinking of her in that bookshop where we met; so young and bright and innocent, so pretty. How could I have let my darling Laura go away? I thought keeping her with us was the right thing to do. Anyway, Hester wouldn’t have stood for it.’

‘Oh, Roddy!’ She went to take him in her arms, but he pushed her away.

‘Don’t!’

‘Why not?’ she asked, shocked.

‘Just don’t. I can’t bear you to touch me, not now. I can’t stand you making excuses for what I did. The words mean nothing. I know what I did.’ He was shouting now and his face was ugly with misery and rage.

Queenie wanted to say, ‘Don’t shout. You’ll wake Evan,’ but didn’t dare interrupt.

‘I know I said the cruellest possible thing to a woman who was sick, to the woman who was my wife, goddammit. I don’t deserve to be happy. I don’t deserve you. What right do I have to spend the rest of my life in married bliss when Laura’s dead and it’s all my fault?’

His words hung in the air for a long time. They sat in silence, together, on the settee, while Queenie tried to digest their meaning. Was Roddy saying they wouldn’t get married, not ever?

The telephone rang. He jumped to his feet to answer.

‘That’s marvellous news, Ned. Congratulations.’ He listened for a while, then said, ‘Give Hester my love. Oh, and Queenie’s too. Don’t worry, you stay as long as you like. Yes, Evan’s fast asleep. He’s been no trouble. Good night, Ned.’

He replaced the receiver and came back into the living room. ‘Hester’s had the operation. She and the baby are fine. It’s a girl, she’s only little and a bit fragile. You know what they’re going to call her?’