Was it any wonder that she herself had so loved to be round at Rosie’s house when she was a bairn? This place might have the luxury of a bathroom and inside netty, but she had always known she would have swapped her comfortable lifestyle - the spacious bedroom all to herself, the wardrobe of clothes and the trappings of middle-class wealth - for Rosie’s cramped little two-up, two-down house where there had been warmth and laughter and love.
She hated her father and she wished he was dead.
It was a thought that had been at the back of her mind for years and was all the stronger for being unvoiced. The humiliation and pain that went hand-in-hand with his thrashings was always there. How many times had she told herself she didn’t need to feel such degradation? That he was nothing but a dictatorial, inhuman bully? Hundreds. Thousands. Nevertheless it was shame at her own weakness that kept her lips sealed about the years of beatings, not fear.
But she was seventeen now, and she wasn’t standing for it any more.
He was advancing on her in the same manner as always, slowly, even calmly, but this time Flora took two rapid steps towards him and something in her stance checked the tall broad figure wielding the belt. ‘I meant what I said. You try hitting me just one more time and I’ll do for you, and I don’t mean physically,’ she ground out through clenched teeth. ‘I’ll tell Peter. I mean it, I will, and he’ll believe me. Oh yes, he’ll believe me all right. And that goes for Mam too, you touch her again and I’m straight to Peter and his da.’
‘Why, you young--’
‘And your boss at the brewery, Mr Barrett. I’m sure he’d be interested to hear about the goings-on here. And your cosy chapelite cronies? They’re not above a bit of nice juicy gossip I’m sure, in spite of all their piety. I’ll do it, I will, ’cos I’ve had enough.’
They were looking at each other now, the big, solid, moustached man and the slender young girl, and such was his surprise that he could say nothing. Even when the explosion came it was blustering and without weight. Flora didn’t answer him, there was no need; besides which her stand had taken her as much by surprise as it had him, perhaps even more so. She was actually awed at her temerity and amazed at her daring, but in those hours when they had sat and waited at Rosie’s house for Molly to be found, and she and Sally had acted the jesters as though it was just another ordinary evening, she had found herself hating all men. And when they had brought Molly in, wrapped in that gaudy bedspread or whatever it was, and she had looked into the young face that somehow wasn’t so young any more, the hate had begun to bubble up in a way that had made her want to hurt someone. No, not someone - she had known who she wanted to hurt.
And she wasn’t going to be a victim any longer.
She left the room steadily, not rushing but taking her time, and as she did so she glanced once at her mother’s white, drawn face, but the other woman’s distress did not cause her to pause or falter. She had stepped over a line tonight, and although it had been the means of extricating herself from the power and authority of her father, it had also had the effect of distancing her from her mother. Her mother was too petrified of him to cast her allegiance with her daughter and they both knew it.
A few minutes later as she stood in her own bedroom, her arms crossed and her hands gripping either side of her waist, Flora looked about her. This room was full of appeasement. It was seeping out of the pretty bedspread and matching curtains and the big thick square of carpet in the middle of the room. It was in the small bookcase filled with expensive books and the gramophone in one corner, its stack of records lining the shelf above. She had all the latest hits - ‘Chicago’, ‘Limehouse Blues’, ‘I wish I could Shimmy like my Sister Kate’ - and they had all been bought by her father. Everything in this room had been bought by him. It was the same with her mother; when her father had spoken of buying a wireless set last week, with a loud-speaker instead of headphones so they could all listen to it, she had known her mother would be wearing concealing clothes and moving carefully. Oh why,
why
couldn’t her mam fight back just once? Tears were trickling down Flora’s face now but she made no effort to brush them away as she stood, swaying slightly back and forth, in the middle of the room. But she wasn’t going to be bought off any more, and neither was she going to be intimidated into keeping quiet. She
would
tell Peter or Mr Barrett if her father raised his hand to her again.
Oh . . . She walked across to the bed and sat down abruptly on the flowered coverlet. She wished she was Rosie. She did, in spite of all this with Molly, and Rosie’s mam being like she was with the drink and all, and Rosie having to watch every penny; she still would give everything she possessed to be Rosie. What was that bit in the Bible that her old Sunday School teacher had been so fond of? Oh yes: ‘Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.’ Some of the other bairns had laughed at Miss Brent but she had known exactly what the old maid had been getting at. By, she had.
Part Three
Marriages and Homecomings
Chapter Ten
The traditional Egyptian house was two-storeyed and rectangular, built of brick moulded from mud, and the flat roof was supported by big palm rafters. The tall, broad-shouldered man standing looking down into the sun-baked fields below, where a line of family laundry, drying from a rope held between two ancient fig trees, fluttered gently in the sun and light breeze, could have been mistaken for a native of Cairo by his dress. The long flowing galabiya was of white linen and the man looked comfortable and relaxed in it as he stood eating from a small bowl of rice, lentils and pasta liberally sprinkled with white, crumbly and highly salted goat’s cheese.
The meal finished the man turned, and immediately his greeny-brown eyes set in a face that was unmistakably foreign, and his light hair bleached golden brown by the fierce sun, proclaimed he was not an Arab, although his nut-brown skin was as dark as any national’s.
Why was he putting off the inevitable? Davey Connor narrowed his eyes as he stared up into a sky as blue as the cornflowers back home.
Home.
He moved restlessly, his tanned brow wrinkling, but today he couldn’t keep the lid on his thoughts as he usually did. Today they were determined to escape and have free rein and it was something of a relief to let them go.
He had been away for almost five years but he felt he’d aged five decades, aye, and then some. When he looked back on the ignorant and naive lad who had left Sunderland he didn’t know whether he wanted to laugh or weep. Left? The word mocked him with its dignity. It had been an ignominious retreat at best, but he hadn’t realized it until the day when he had acknowledged he’d exchanged the hell of the pit for an equally precarious existence under the jurisdiction of a complete madman.
When he had signed on the cargo vessel bound for the Suez Canal four days before his nineteenth birthday, after three months of working on the Culler tugboat in Tynemouth, he had counted it as good fortune. He’d wanted to get right away from Tyne and Wear and all it held, and the Mediterranean, with the exotic-sounding names it encompassed, had seemed perfect. Two days into the voyage he had understood why none of the more experienced sailors had wanted to sail on the
President
- its captain, a great brawny giant of a man with skin like weathered leather and the biggest hands Davey had ever seen, was an unbalanced tyrant.
The crew of twelve had had their work cut out to manage the big cargo vessel and it didn’t help that most of them were young landlubbers like himself. Captain McGrathe had worked them like dogs, nineteen or twenty hours a day, until they had dropped.
He could still picture the turret ship in his mind’s eye, its big deck raised along the centre rather than flush in an effort to reduce the deck area and lower the passage charges at the Suez Canal, and hear the piercing screams of Micky Rawlings, one of the lads whom Captain McGrathe had had flogged for some minor infringement of the rules. He’d decided then that if he lasted until Port Said he would jump ship and forgo the payment due when they returned to England, even if it meant he was stranded in a foreign country with no money or belongings and just the clothes he stood up in.
It had been mid-June when the ship had arrived in Port Said and Davey had felt he’d sailed into an oven. The air was desiccated and scorching, but when the ship had docked just before sunset and the Mediterranean had become a saffron sea, the sun dropping into it surprisingly quickly like a juicy ripe Egyptian orange, he had been hooked. His past life - Sunderland, Rosie - had faded to an impossible, half-remembered dream, an illusion so far removed from the blazing hot world of colour and light he found himself in as to be unattainable.
It had been surprisingly easy to jump ship during the night, and he had determined to make his way across country towards the Nile in an effort to lose himself in this new land.
The cordiality displayed by the ordinary Egyptian people to this stranger in their midst who had been unable to speak a word of their language had both amazed and humbled him. He had discovered hospitality was almost a sacred duty in their culture, dating back to the times when nomadic tribes frequently roamed the deserts - harsh places even at the best of times - and with a relentless sun beating down all day, and nightfall bringing a sharp drop in temperature and producing shivering cold, he’d been glad of the unwritten law that food and shelter be given unquestioningly to any stranger.
It had taken him almost eighteen months to work his way to the ancient city of Cairo, positioned at the apex of the fertile Nile delta some hundred kilometres south of the Mediterranean coast, and in that time he had tried his hand at whatever employment came his way. He’d spent a couple of months gathering dates from the tall palm trees in one place, a few weeks ploughing fields in another, but eventually he arrived at a small farm on the outskirts of Cairo in January 1922, penniless and virtually in rags.
And he had been fortunate, he knew that now. Egypt’s land was rich in natural fertilizers and bore fruit the whole year round - wheat, rice, corn and flowers thrived during the winter, cotton and sugar in the spring and fruit in the summer - and owing to an outbreak of cholera having taken Mohamed’s - the owner of the farm - three sons and wife and daughter two months before he had arrived, the wiry gnarled Egyptian had been hard-pressed and glad of another pair of hands.
Davey had toiled long and hard in the fields surrounding the farm using methods introduced some five thousand years before, but still effective. He had become accustomed to the
shaduf
, a device with a weighted lever used to raise water from the river Nile into the irrigation canals running between the crops, and the
saqiyya
, a water wheel drawn by oxen.
The sight of his fellow workers ploughing the fields and women carrying home the harvest on the backs of donkeys had satisfied something deep in his soul, and he had earnt first Mohamed’s respect and then his friendship with the zealousness of his commitment to the farm and his work.
In return for his services Mohamed had given him shelter and food in his own house, along with a small wage, and Davey had told himself he was content in this country of a thousand minarets, where the nights were scented by the sweet white jasmine flowers and sun-warmed crops, and visits into the city echoed with the sound of the muezzin’s voice calling the faithful to prayer. His former life underground in the dark bowels of the earth only surfaced in the odd nightmare, now his waking hours were spent in the warm clean air, and for the first year or so he had revelled in it despite the occasional hankering for England’s green countryside and rainy summers. He still revelled in it, but . . . He sighed irritably. She was always there in the back of his mind, his northern rose, and the urge to find out where she was, what she was doing, who she was with was gnawing at him.
Aw, man. He shook his head now, angry at himself. Life was good here, he had fallen on his feet, and he’d be stark staring barmy to throw it all away and go back. Ten to one she was married to Shane McLinnie, she might even have had a bairn or two now despite all her fancy talk of what she wanted out of life. Talk, it had all been talk - women were good at saying one thing and meaning another. And he knew a bit about women now, certainly a darn sight more than when he had left Sunderland at any rate. But none of them had meant anything, not even the first, a little sloe-eyed beauty who had crept into his bed one night in his date-picking days when her husband was away.
Damn it! He threw the bowl down onto a large rectangular piece of wood that served as a table where it spun crazily for a few seconds before coming to a shuddering halt. How did you get someone out of your head and your bones? He had tried, heaven knew he had tried, but that dark-eyed, pale-complexioned ghost refused to go.
If he had known then what he knew now things would have been different. The sun was beating down on his uncovered head, its heat considerable, but Davey was back in Sunderland on a cold snowy winter’s night. He should have moved heaven and earth to take her away from Shane McLinnie, played him at his own game, done whatever it took. Rosie had been like a lamb to the slaughter, that was the truth of it, and what had he done? Skedaddled off in a fit of wounded pride. He had been a fool. He’d left the gate wide open for McLinnie, damn it.