The Old House on the Corner (31 page)

Anyroad, Gran had probably been watching the whole time, tut-tutting loudly, shaking her head, and saying, even more loudly, ‘That
girl
!’ which she always did whenever Victoria had done something naughty, looking at her straight in the face, yet speaking as if she wasn’t there.

‘Are you there, Gran?’ she asked. ‘Are you watching? Can you see the state of the house? It’s disgusting. We both just sat and let the place rot around us. At
least you kept it clean. You should have seen the cobwebs on the ceiling. I was covered in them by the time I’d finished, but you probably saw that an’ all. You used to be able to see around corners when you were alive.’

She wondered if Gran had met Mum during the time she’d been in heaven. ‘Say hello to her for me. Tell her I miss her, I always have, just like I miss you and Granddad and I’ll miss the house once I’m gone.’ It was hard to imagine living anywhere else.

‘I must be going mad,’ Victoria said, to herself this time, ‘sending a message from one dead person to another. It’s time I did something useful for a change, like sponging down the wallpaper. That should keep me busy for a few days.’

She prepared a bucket of warm, soapy water and had washed half the hall – to little effect – when Rachel Williams called and invited her for coffee at eleven o’clock. ‘It’s for Kathleen Cartwright really. She wants to meet everyone. Sarah Rees-James and Marie Jordan are coming. I’m just off to ask Anna Burrows and I’d better remind Kathleen in case she’s forgotten.’

Victoria had almost finished another wall when Ernest Burrows came and asked if she could spare the time to go shopping with him and Anna for a computer that afternoon and she said she’d love to, particularly when Ernie said they would have lunch first.

‘I hadn’t forgotten, not at all,’ Kathleen said, ‘but I thought you might not feel up to it. You look a bit … harassed.’

‘I feel fine today,’ Rachel professed, although her
eyes were wild and her face red and shiny with perspiration.

‘Would you like to come in for a minute?’

‘No, thank you. I only came to remind you.’

Kathleen offered to come early and help get things ready, but Rachel said she could manage on her own. ‘It’s only coffee and I made some fairy cakes first thing this morning.’ She dropped her eyes and ran her fingers through her untidy hair. ‘I’m sorry about yesterday. It was just when I heard that little girl in the next cubicle. She reminded me of Alice. She used to tell me how beautiful I was. So did Kirsty and James when they were little, but now they think I’m just a mess.’

‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ Kathleen protested.

‘It is,’ Rachel said flatly. ‘Well, I won’t hold you up any longer. I’ll see you later, shall I?’

‘I’m looking forward to it.’

‘Who was that?’ Steve asked when Kathleen closed the door and went into the kitchen where they’d been having a late breakfast.

‘Rachel. She’s invited me for coffee.’ She looked at him, eyes narrowed, daring him to say something offensive about her new friend, but he didn’t speak. ‘I won’t be gone long,’ she added, resenting that she felt slightly guilty for leaving a grown man by himself.

‘Take as long as you like. I shouldn’t have said anything yesterday. I suppose I was just worried about you – and I missed you.’

‘Anna will be at the coffee morning. Why don’t you go round and see Ernie?’ she suggested. ‘He’ll be on his own too.’

Steve smiled. ‘There’s no need to find me a
playmate, luv. I’ll go for a walk, buy meself a newspaper. D’you know we’re not far from Penny Lane? The girls’ll be tickled pink when I tell them I’ve been there.’ He groaned and made a face. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that. It just slipped out without me thinking. For the moment, I’d forgotten they’d grown up.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘Who was that on the phone last night?’ he asked casually. ‘I seem to remember you were speaking to someone when I came in.’

She wasn’t prepared to lie. ‘It was Michael.’

‘I see.’ He nodded and looked grim.

‘I doubt if you do,’ she said shortly. ‘After the things you’d said earlier, I needed someone to talk to. There was no one else but him.’

‘What happens if
I
need someone to talk to?’

‘Oh, don’t be so childish, Steve.’ She went over to the sink and began to wash the breakfast dishes when there was a crash behind her. When she looked, startled, Steve had swept the milk jug off the table with a single sweep of his big hand.

‘Don’t you dare call me childish!’ he said in a low, grating voice she’d never heard before, his face ugly with rage. ‘I’m fed up being treated like a kid. Last night, I was just trying to explain how I felt. I was being honest with you. I thought you’d understand.’

‘Understand?’ Kathleen cried. ‘Understand when you tell me that Jean’s part of you? How do you think that makes me feel?
I
want to be part of you. I want … oh, I don’t know
what
I want.’ She burst into tears, hating herself for it, knowing how easily he was moved by tears – it was Jean’s tears that were calling him back home and she didn’t want to play his wife’s
game. ‘I’m so mixed up. I don’t know what
you
want either. Perhaps we should never have come away together.’

‘Don’t say that!’ His rage vanished as quickly as it had come and he pulled her on to his knee. ‘I’m mixed up too.’ He buried his head in her shoulder. ‘I don’t know whether I’m coming or going,’ he said in a muffled voice. ‘I’m sick of us fighting.’

Kathleen sniffed. ‘So am I.’

‘I love you.’

‘And I love you.’

He stroked her face. ‘Let’s not fight any more. I promise never to mention Jean again.’

‘And I promise not to ring Michael.’ She remembered that, in September, their son had invited them to Denmark for the weekend, but September was a long way off. She’d cross that bridge when she came to it.

‘Did you notice,’ Anna said to the assembled women, ‘that the curtains are up in the empty bungalow?’

Everyone said they hadn’t, apart from Rachel who told them a woman had come round the night before to borrow a torch.

‘She’d forgotten to bring one and it was dark and she couldn’t find where to switch the electricity on. Her name’s Donna Moon and the house isn’t hers, but her mother-in-law’s – she’s moving in tomorrow. The furniture’s coming this morning and Donna will be back to see to it. I invited her for coffee, but she said she’d be too busy.’

The conversation turned to mothers-in-law. Sarah Rees-James had never met hers. ‘Alex had a big family somewhere in London, but they never saw each other.
Maybe he was ashamed of them – or they were ashamed of him. Now I’ll never know.’

Rachel told them Frank’s mother had put him into care and had had nothing to do with him since. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to meet her,’ she said with a little shudder.

‘My first husband’s mother was a really charming person,’ Kathleen said, feeling obliged to contribute towards the discussion. ‘She died two years ago and I was terribly upset. Steve’s mother was already dead when I met him. Steve and I only recently married,’ she added for the benefit of anyone who hadn’t already heard the lie she’d told.

Marie Jordan didn’t contribute towards the conversation, Kathleen noticed. She seemed very uptight, as if something was troubling her. Victoria wasn’t married and didn’t have a mother-in-law, and Anna said she hadn’t met hers either. ‘Though I would have loved to. According to Ernie, she was a wonderful person, but they lost touch during the war.’

‘Is that when you met Ernie, in the war?’ Rachel enquired.

‘Yes, in Cairo.’ Anna’s eyes glowed. ‘We stayed in Cairo for years afterwards, and then moved to the South of France. We also spent time in Paris and Rome – we even lived for a while in Las Vegas. Ernie used to be an inveterate gambler.’

‘He doesn’t look like a gambler,’ Kathleen remarked. ‘He gives the impression of being a very cautious man.’

‘Oh, he is, he is,’ Anna trilled. ‘He’s a very cautious gambler. Have any of you ever been in a casino?’ Everyone shook their heads, enthralled by the turn the conversation had taken. ‘Well,’ Anna went on, ‘you
probably don’t know that in roulette you can bet on a number the ball lands in, or you can bet on the colour. Ernie always put his chips on the black, knowing the ball was bound to end up on black eventually. If it didn’t, he’d double his stake, then double it again if he lost. One night,’ Anna paused for a dramatic breath, ‘one night, the ball landed on red nine times in a row. Now Ernie’s not the sort to get all hot and bothered, but that night his hands were shaking. He’d started off with a thousand francs, but now he’d have to stake – I can’t work out how much it would be,’ she said, fretful all of a sudden.

‘Just over five hundred thousand.’ Kathleen was good at mental arithmetic.

‘Half a million francs,’ Sarah gasped. ‘How much is that in English money?’

‘I don’t know,’ Anna confessed. ‘The exchange rate was very different in those days; there were hundreds and hundreds of francs to the pound. Anyway, all our money had gone, every penny. Poor Ernie was shattered, so I did no more than turn to the woman next to me and offer to exchange my ruby necklace for her chips. She didn’t hesitate – she knew she was getting a bargain – so I threw the chips on the black square and we won.’

The women uttered a relieved sigh, and Victoria said in wonder, ‘You actually had a ruby necklace?’

‘I did indeed,’ Anna said boastfully.

‘I bet Ernie never went near a casino again for a long time,’ Rachel commented.

‘Oh, no, dear. We just went to the bar and had a drink – champagne, if I remember rightly – and he was back at the tables within an hour.’

‘Wow!’ Sarah gasped. ‘We used to spend holidays in
the South of France when I was little. Daddy loved casinos, but he always lost. Mummy used to get terribly cross with him. What a fantastic life you’ve led, Anna!’

Anna preened herself and Kathleen said, ‘And that’s not all. Before the war, she was an actress. Tell them about the film you made, Anna.’

‘Well,’ Anna began, only too willing, ‘I was only seventeen …’

By rights, Ernest’s ears should have been burning considering the amount of personal information his wife was conveying to the women across the way. Instead, inspired by the dream, he was thinking about his mother sitting in front of the fire in Chaucer Street, knitting needles moving backwards and forwards like pistons on an engine. He hadn’t ‘lost touch’, as Anna had put it. When he’d first got to North Africa, he’d written regularly to his mother, but his letters had got fewer and fewer and had stopped altogether when he met Anna. There was only room for one woman in his life and she was all he could think of.

By then, Ernest had changed, no longer the same naive, inexperienced nineteen-year-old who’d left Bootle what seemed like a hundred years ago. No way could he see himself going back, marrying Magdalene, and working in a chandler’s shop for the rest of his life – he wrote to Magdalene and told her. She didn’t reply and Mam’s painfully written, badly-spelt letters continued to arrive, but stopped after a while when he didn’t answer – she probably thought they weren’t reaching him.

He didn’t even go to see his family when he was demobbed at a base in Kent, not prepared to waste
days of his time when all he wanted was to get back to Anna and their future together.

‘I was a bastard,’ Ernest told himself. ‘A selfish, unthinking bastard.’ He hadn’t even thought to contact Gaynor or Charlie when he returned to Liverpool with Anna ten years ago. Liverpool had been her idea, not his.

‘Let’s retire,’ she’d said. ‘Properly retire, go somewhere completely different and make new friends.’ Their old friends were dead or had retired themselves and the disease she had was getting worse. She was having more bad periods and fewer remissions. ‘I don’t want you pushing me around Monte Carlo or Paris in a wheelchair, Ernie. It would be too sad for words.’

He’d never forget the day Anna was told she had Multiple Sclerosis. It was like a death sentence. Ernest had thought he wouldn’t have her for much longer. Nearly thirty years later, she was still alive to entertain him every minute of every day.

They’d moved to Liverpool and it had taken ten years and a vivid dream to prompt Ernest into thinking about Mam and the brother and sister he’d left behind when he was barely out of his teens.

Gaynor and Charlie would be well into their sixties by now and could be anywhere in the world – Gaynor was likely to have married and changed her name. On impulse, he picked up the telephone directory and looked for Burtonshaw. There were only two and one had the initial ‘C’. Now all he had to do was pick up the phone and dial, but Ernest, usually a man of courage, couldn’t bring himself to do it. What would he say if he established that the C. Burtonshaw was his half-brother, Charlie? ‘Hello, this is Ernie. Nice
talking to you again after sixty years. Sorry I didn’t get in touch sooner.’

He’d discuss it with Anna. She’d know what to do, she always did.

There was a loud, rumbling noise outside and when he looked a furniture van had driven into the square. It stopped outside the bungalow where curtains had been put up the night before. A row of curious faces appeared in the window of Rachel Williams’s house where the women were having coffee. Ernest grinned. What interest people found in other people’s furniture would always be a mystery to him.

After they’d tired of watching the removal men carry in Mrs Moon’s strangely painted furniture – apart from Kathleen who considered it degrading and had remained in her seat – Rachel refilled everyone’s coffee cups and brought in another plate of fairy cakes. Anna had exhausted herself and was listening for a change. She was a remarkable woman, Kathleen thought, very old and very ill, but with no intention of sinking into the background as other women in the same position might. She thrust herself forward, determined not to go unnoticed.

Having dealt with television and their favourite programmes, dismissed politics as dull and unworthy of discussion, and swapped their favourite recipes, Victoria was now telling them what the square used to look like before the houses had been built.