‘
What?
’ Em fell back on the bed so that her head was resting on Norm’s stomach, both of them howling with laughter.
It was a while before either of them could speak again, but eventually she managed to roll over and look directly at him. They searched each other’s eyes and, knowing that what they saw was true, put their arms around one another.
‘You,’ Em said, wet-faced, ‘are the daftest bugger alive, but for some reason I love you. I can’t seem to help it.’
June 1948
‘Bye-bye – see you tomorrow. Say goodbye, Michael!’
Maudie, heavily pregnant, stood at her door waving them off, a smile on her face, which was for the moment plumper than usual.
‘Thanks, see you in the morning!’ Katie called.
Michael waved and then, without looking what he was doing, reached out for his mother and almost fell down the step.
‘Careful! I’m here, silly,’ she laughed, taking his hand and walking along with him. ‘Have you had a nice day?’
Michael turned his serious, deep-brown eyes up to hers, nodding. ‘We did plasticine. Can I have a bun?’
Katie showed him a little white paper bag. ‘I got a currant bun. But you have it for your pudding. You’ll spoil your tea else.’
‘Oh, Mom – I’m hungry!’ Michael protested. ‘Please. Can I?’
As they turned into their road she relented and broke off a bit of the bun. ‘Here, that’ll keep you going. But you’re not having it all, so don’t ask me. ’Ey-up – what’s going on?’
Usually when she got home from work the house was quiet. On a nice day like today, Sybil would be out at the back, tending her beloved garden. But in the distance Katie could see Sybil out at the front, and the neighbours, Edna Arbuckle and her daughter Susan, were at the wall that divided their houses, all deep in conversation. Both Arbuckles were large, fleshy women, especially Susan, who was thirty-five and still lived with her mother. She was big-boned and beetle-browed, her thick hair cut savagely into a bob around her heavy jaw. Her mother’s one reigning obsession was to find her a husband.
They all turned as she and Michael reached the gate, and Edna Arbuckle, a paler-haired, softer woman than her daughter, said portentously, ‘You’re going to have to tell her, Miss Routh.’
Katie’s pulse quickened. What on earth was the matter? Michael was perfectly fine, as obviously were Maudie and Sybil Routh, and there was no one else she could think of to worry about.
‘Ah – Katie,’ Sybil said, limping towards her. She suffered with her feet and was, as usual, wearing slippers with her smudgy green frock. In the bright sun, her grey hair seemed to have a yellow tinge. ‘Bit of a do, I’m afraid. We’ve lost Mr Gudgeon.’
‘Lost him?’ Katie wondered for a split second whether he had ambled off somewhere.
‘Dead in his bed,’ Sybil said with her usual directness. Katie heard Edna Arbuckle make a slight sound of protest. Edna would always have whispered
passed away
. Or even
fallen asleep
, which would only have confused things further. ‘I had to have him carted away in an ambulance.’ This phrasing provoked another squeak from the other side of the wall.
‘The poor, poor man,’ Edna said, mopping her eyes. Susan looked weepy and pink-cheeked too. If Sybil was upset, it would have been hard to tell, but Katie knew that was the way with Sybil. She didn’t wear her heart on her sleeve. Michael, still chewing on his bit of bun, was staring up at them all in fascination.
A thought made Edna perk up. ‘I suppose you’ll be looking for another lodger now, won’t you, Miss Routh?’
‘Oh, I dare say.’ Sybil held the gate open for Katie and Michael and, as if grateful to have a reason to escape, ushered them into the house and shut the door.
‘Oh!’ she declared. ‘That woman – how she does keep on! I’m all behind myself, but I have got a stew pot on. I expect you need a cup of tea . . .’
Katie followed her shuffling figure – so familiar now, with her baggy clothes, hair pinned up in a bun – to the back kitchen, from where there was a delicious smell of stew. Sybil was good at making food tasty, even on short rations. In fact, despite her bad hands and feet, Sybil ran the house very competently.
She made tea, then fished about in the kitchen cupboard. ‘I could do with a nip of something stronger . . . Want some?’ She held out a bottle of malt whisky, which she only ever drank on very special occasions.
‘Oh, no thanks,’ Katie said. She didn’t like even the smell of whisky, and certainly didn’t want to deprive Sybil.
‘Ah!’ She took a nip and sank down on a chair with an outrush of breath. ‘That’s the ticket.’
Katie sat Michael down and poured a helping of tea into her saucer for him.
‘So – whatever happened? To Mr Gudgeon, I mean?’
‘Oh, well, the old boy never got up this morning is the long and short of it. Must have gone in his sleep. The awful thing is, I didn’t notice, because as you know he didn’t always rise early, and I was going up to the shops myself today. I went off smartish, so as not to be right at the back of that beastly meat queue – hence . . .’ and she gestured at the stew pot. ‘It was only later, when I’d got back and was looking to see if I had any pearl barley . . . I realized the house was quiet. You know, a different sort of quiet from usual. Eventually I went up and tapped on his door, and there was no reply. The poor old fellow was stiff as a board by then, no teeth in – oh dear, oh dear. I mean, he was going on for eighty, but it’s always a shock when it happens.’
‘Poor you,’ Katie said sadly. ‘What a thing to happen. She had liked Mr Gudgeon, who had been a timid, kindly man. They had seen more of him after the death of his wife, last year.
‘And now,’ Sybil said, knocking back the last of her Scotch and rallying herself, ‘as Edna so rightly predicted, I shall have to look for a new tenant.’
‘You won’t have any trouble there,’ Katie said. ‘There’ll be a queue.’
‘I know.’ Sybil grimaced, before her lined face broke into a wicked grin. ‘But will any of them be
a husband for Susan
?’
When Katie first moved into the household of Sybil Routh, it had taken her some time to get used to it, and to what was expected.
‘I think it’s going to be all right,’ she reported to Maudie the first week, as they had a cuppa together. ‘The room’s lovely, now I’ve got a few of my things in it, and Miss Routh is
so
much nicer than some of those other miserable old bitches I could have had as landladies. She even lets Michael tinkle on the piano sometimes, and it’s quite a racket. And she’s very pleased if I lend a hand, which I’m quite happy to do. Her feet look so sore for moving around much. But she is rather odd, isn’t she?’
‘I think her background was quite bohemian,’ Maudie said, frowning as she tried to remember what she’d heard about Sybil Routh. ‘At least on her mother’s side. Father was a clergyman of course, but with his own ideas to some extent, and I think her mother had come from a family of arty types. So what with the missionary input and the artistes, she’s a bit of a rum mixture.’
At first, Katie was nervous of Miss Routh. Her posh, outspoken manner was not what Katie was used to, but she quickly discovered several things that made life in the house a very good experience. The first was that while Sybil Routh was interested in what was going on in the world, and in humanity in general, she was not nosy about people in particular. She did not pry, nor did Katie find herself cross-questioned about her past or feel that her privacy was going to be invaded. But she realized, over time, that if she did tell Sybil things, she would not been shocked or judgemental – she seemed to treat people with a broad, breezy objectivity.
Secondly, the fact that she demanded that the household share their evening meal together meant that life was not lonely, that Michael got to know other adults, and that the atmosphere in the house was gently, if eccentrically, friendly. They all assembled in the evening after Sybil banged the mellow-sounding gong on the hall table. At first there had been the quiet banker Mr Treace, who over time had been replaced by various harmless young men, clerks and salesmen requiring lodgings in what was the smallest room on offer in the house. None of them really stuck in the memory. The latest was a slightly older man, Mr Jenkins, who was doing the accounts in a firm on the Soho Road. Then there were the Gudgeons. Mrs Gudgeon scarcely ever left her room, but Mr Gudgeon had taken his evening meals with them, before carrying a portion up to feed to his sickly wife. He was a faded, shy person with clicking, badly fitting dentures, but had a genuine and kindly nature. Sometimes he told them stories about his past out in Barnt Green as a boy.
Katie began to relax and realize that she and Michael could have a safe, settled life here. Sybil had a gift for uniting this rather unpromising group of people into a household with character. Katie also began to have time to take more interest in the outside world. Sybil was forever listening in to the news. When the Mahatma, Mr Gandhi, had been assassinated earlier that year, Sybil was so upset that none of them could have avoided hearing and learning about the man, and all that he had meant.
The other thing was that Sybil soon cottoned on to the fact that Katie could sew. Anxious to please, Katie offered to do various bits of mending.
‘I was always a cack-handed seamstress at the best of times,’ Sybil admitted. ‘But now of course my hands are no use for anything delicate at all.’ Both her hands and feet were gnarled and painful with arthritis.
‘Oh, I’m quite happy to sew,’ Katie told her.
‘In fact, if you’re that keen . . . Can you tailor garments as well?’
‘Yes, my mother taught me! She was – is . . . a seamstress . . .’
Sybil bypassed an opportunity to be nosy here, for which Katie was very grateful. ‘There’s an old Singer out in the privy at the back. We could bring it in and get it cleaned up and oiled. You’re welcome to use it. I expect you could do with making things for the boy.’
Katie soon turned her hand to getting the machine working. It was perfectly all right, apart from dust and cobwebs and in need of a dash of oil.
‘Thank you so much, Miss Routh!’ she said. ‘I’d thought about trying to get hold of one somewhere, but I shan’t have to now. And if you’d like me to sew anything for you, you only have to say.’
‘Well now,’ Sybil said, ‘I do have some cloth that would make a frock – so if you wouldn’t mind . . . And do call me by my Christian name, for heaven’s sake. I feel like a schoolteacher being “Miss Routhed” all the time.’
‘Of course, er, Sybil,’ Katie said. ‘I can make you something based on one of your other ones, can’t I?’
Sybil produced a bolt of cloth from somewhere upstairs, of dark-blue swirls on a yellow-and-white background.
‘I’m sure it’s meant for curtains really,’ she said. ‘But beggars can’t be choosers, can we?’
‘She thinks you’re marvellous,’ Maudie told Katie a few weeks after she’d moved in. ‘She was singing your praises to several of the others after Communion on Sunday.’
Katie wondered nervously whether Sybil would expect her to go to church as well, and what she’d think if she knew Katie was a Catholic. One Sunday, when she saw Sybil getting ready to go out, in her large straw hat, she took courage and said, ‘I haven’t been very good about keeping it up, as I’ve been so busy. But I might start taking Michael to Mass soon.’
She waited for the ceiling to fall in. Sybil glanced round, then back into the glass where she was adjusting her hat.
‘Ah, you’re a Holy Roman, are you? I did wonder, with a name like O’Neill.’ She tidied her collar, putting her head on one side. ‘Queer business, church. Still, I was brought up to it, you see.’ She pressed her hat harder down onto her head. ‘And I do find that if you can stick it out, it can be frightfully entertaining.’
Katie’s regard and fondness for Sybil Routh had increased over the months that she was a tenant in her house, but it was last winter’s freeze that had really created a bond between the two women.
The snow began in late January, so much of it that the country was gripped by a terrible freeze and a state of emergency. The novelty of the first day or two – Michael out in the street with the other children, snowballing and pulling each other along on trays – quickly wore off.
‘Well,’ Sybil announced one morning at the beginning of February. ‘It’s happened – everything’s frozen up. I can’t get any water out of the tap. Don’t go trying to flush any lavatories until I see if the downpipe is frozen as well. We’ll have to think what to do.’
‘Thank goodness!’ she announced shortly afterwards. The downpipe was still working. Soon they were all helping to melt snow in an old tin baby’s bath over the range, for flushing the toilets and having a wash. Basic living became a huge operation: melting snow, trying to get anywhere, buying food. Evenings were spent swathed in coats close to the fire in the dining room, though Sybil had insisted that the Gudgeons must have the little electric-bar fire in their room.
‘She can’t be moved, and the pair of them will freeze to death else,’ Sybil said. ‘They’re like a pair of little birds – no flesh on them.’