‘Oh dear God,’ Lizzie breathed, watching the scene with tears streaming down her face. The younger
policeman had handcuffed Steve and, holding him firmly, blew the whistle in his mouth.
Suddenly, a paddy wagon screamed to a halt and a policeman, with coshes raised, manhandled Steve into it with little ceremony. ‘And him?’ he then asked, indicating Mike.
‘No,’ the younger copper said, helping his stunned mate to his feet. ‘He was trying to calm the mad bugger down. Go home,’ he advised Mike again. ‘And tell his people, because he’ll be on a charge in the morning for this.’ He indicated his mate, who would have fallen without his support and stood swaying and shaking his head from side to side.
Mike knew he had no option but to do as the policeman suggested and he looked up at the window to see the faces framed there and gave one wave before making for home.
The Gillespie house was in darkness, and Mike hesitated. But they had to know. No tabs were kept on Steve, but they’d be worried if he wasn’t in his bed in the morning; and then there was work. He had no choice but to lift the knocker.
It was Rodney who came, his trousers obviously pulled hurriedly on, for the braces hung either side. His top and feet were bare, and behind him on the stairs Mike could see Flo in a dressing gown with her curlered hair tied up in a turban.
‘What is it, man?’ Rodney barked.
Mike glanced up and down the street. He could see no one but he knew many would have been disturbed by the sudden knock in the quiet street and might even
now be peering out at the commotion on the Gillespie doorstep, and so he said, ‘Can I come in?’
‘Yeah, of course,’ Rodney said.
Flo, seeing who it was, followed them into the living room and demanded, ‘Where’s our Steve?’
And Mike told them both as succinctly as possible what Steve had done and what the consequences were.
Flo knew Steve would have been drunk, for he’d had a skinful at lunchtime, but she had no idea what had brought it on. And now, prison. God, such a thing had never befallen any one of them before. ‘He’ll be out in the morning, though, won’t he?’ she said.
Mike shrugged. ‘He would have been, I think, till he hit the copper.’
‘But what was it over?’
It was no good Mike not telling. It would come out anyway. ‘Lizzie finished with him yesterday,’ he said.
Neil, who’d come down to see who the nocturnal visitor was, gave a hoot of laughter at that. ‘Oh, I bet that dented the big bugger’s ego,’ he said in delight. ‘The boot’s always been on the other foot. Love ‘em and leave ‘em has been that sod’s rule.’
‘Will you shut up!’ Flo cried. ‘Your brother’s in jail and might be up on a charge. Have you no sympathy?’
‘Not a jot,’ Neil said. ‘I hope they throw the book at him, and now I know I’m off back to bed. Night, all.’
Mike, watching Neil go, knew the boy had a point, for Steve had scattered broken hearts willy-nilly over the neighbourhood and never lost any sleep over it. ‘I’ll be off then,’ he said. ‘I just called in to tell you, like.’
‘Will you not stay for a cup of tea?’ Flo asked, as she moved to put the kettle on above the fire, which she poked into life.
‘No, thanks all the same,’ Mike said. ‘I need my bed.’
‘What about work in the morning?’ Rodney asked. ‘What shall we say, for we can’t tell the truth—the lad will be out on his ear and jobs are like gold dust?’
Mike knew that. The unemployment rate was now touching two million and Steve couldn’t afford to lose his job. ‘What d’you want to say?’
‘We’ll say his stomach is upset.’
‘They’ll think he’s had a skinful.’
‘Then they’ll be right, but they won’t know it all and maybe they’ll not need to.’ Rodney glanced across at Flo and said, ‘You go along to the police station tomorrow and see what’s what. Just so we know where we stand an’ all.’
Flo nodded. She knew she’d have to. There was no one else and she knew she could expect little help from Neil.
But Flo didn’t follow her husband to bed after Mike had left. Thoughts of her boy in a prison cell would keep sleep at bay and she knew who was to blame. The same girl that had caused a row each time she was here. And now for that piece to throw her son over! She had no desire to lose Steve to any woman, but for one to indicate he wasn’t good enough! That wasn’t to be borne at all.
What else did Lizzie want in a man? Flo thought. True, he had a temper at times and a liking for the beer, but in that he was like a great many other men;
and as for the women…Well, he was a normal man, after all, and the women usually chased him. You couldn’t blame a man for taking what was on offer.
Everything that had happened to her son that night was down to Lizzie Clooney, and Flo knew she’d never forgive her for as long as she lived.
Steve felt panicky when he came to the next morning and realised where he was. He couldn’t bear being cooped up and he had the desire to hammer on the door, but when he tried to stand, nausea caused him to vomit into the bucket by his bed.
The breakfast they brought him he couldn’t face, but he was grateful for the cup of tea. By lunchtime he’d not been sick for some time, but the headache continued to bother him and he was in no mood for the grinning face that appeared at the hatch.
‘Ready?’ the policeman asked, unlocking the door.
‘Ready? For what?’ So far no one had told him anything.
‘You’re before the magistrate, mate, so on your feet.’
Steve got to his feet gingerly. His head felt as if it were on fire and his red-rimmed eyes burned. The young policeman laughed. ‘You look a pretty sight, I don’t think.’
Steve shut his eyes for a moment against the pain. God, how he wanted to send the young copper’s teeth down his throat, but now he was sober he knew better and he was in no fit state anyway. But what was he talking about, before the magistrate? Just for getting drunk? He thought they’d tell him off and let him go.
‘What have I got to go before the magistrate for?’
‘Ooh, now let’s see. Little string of offences we have. Drunk and disorderly, causing an affray, assaulting a police officer.’
‘Assaulting a police officer?’ Steve said incredulously.
‘No recollection of it, mate?’ the policeman said with a grin. ‘Well, that won’t save you. Come on, let’s get going.’
Flo could have wept when she saw her son. His face was grey and his eyes were bloodshot and had black pouches beneath them. His hair stood on end and his Sunday suit was crumpled and stained.
Steve was fastidious about his appearance. His suits were regularly cleaned and returned to the wardrobe under a plastic cover and he was fussy about his shirts, which had to be pristine white and ironed just so, and on Sundays his tie always matched the handkerchief poking from his pocket.
But in the dock, Steve had no tie and no sign of the handkerchief either. He looked a beaten, crestfallen man and it tore at Flo’s heart.
When the police officer read out the charges against him, Flo saw him shake his head from side to side, as if he couldn’t quite believe it, and she knew he could remember little or nothing of what had happened. That didn’t seem to matter and the magistrate tore into him. ‘Assaulting a police officer is a serious offence and one that can carry a custodial sentence,’ he told Steve. ‘But as you’ve told the court you’re in steady employment we don’t think it would be in the country’s best interests to lock you up.’
Steve let his breath out in a sigh of relief. He’d never even thought of a jail sentence.
‘But, we don’t want to be considered as treating this as a trivial matter,’ the man went on. ‘No indeed, and if you come before me again there will be no doubt about the custodial sentence. This time, however, you are fined seventy-five pounds.’
Seventy-five pounds! The sum reverberated in Steve’s head. How in God’s name was he going to find that sort of money? Christ! The image of Lizzie staring out at him from the window of the hotel suddenly floated before him, and he knew just who was to blame for the state he was in. He’d never forget it for as long as he lived.
Steve and Flo weren’t the only ones blaming Lizzie, for she already did an adequate job of this herself. She thought she’d never get over the sight of Steve hauled into the van, handcuffs holding his hands behind his back, especially as she still thought it was her fault, at least in part. She certainly didn’t want to come across him, not for a while anyway, so when Tressa met Mike in her free periods, Lizzie would sit in her room and hem the sheets and blankets she had picked up cheap in the Bull Ring.
‘Come out with us,’ Pat urged. ‘We go to the flicks, or dancing at Tony’s Ballroom up the West End.’
But Lizzie would shake her head, thinking that at the moment it was best to lie low. Tressa worried about her, and in the end Mike reluctantly agreed she could come out with them a time or two, but she wouldn’t do that either. ‘She’s frightened of bumping into Steve,’
Tressa said, ‘and making things worse for him.’
Nothing could make things worse, Mike thought, for Lizzie’s decision had upset the man totally. He was paralytic each night, not tipsy or merry but fallingdown drunk, and before he got to that state he’d tell any who would listen about Lizzie and how much he had loved her and how he wished he could make her see that. He was hurting, and Mike was well aware of that, but he told Steve he had to keep well away from Lizzie. Steve knew that already and he drank himself into oblivion because that was the only way he could cope with it.
Then, he’d started becoming friendly with a man called Stuart Fellows, who lived at the bottom end of Bell Barn Road. They’d all been to St Catherine’s together, but as Stuart was considered a troublemaker, Mike and Steve had kept well away from him. But now, with Mike meeting Tressa as many nights as he could, they’d sort of been thrown together, and Mike could hardly blame Steve for that.
Stuart was only too willing to go after the women with Steve, despite having a steady girlfriend of his own. ‘Don’t it bother you?’ Mike asked him when the three of them were together one day. ‘What if your girlfriend finds out?’
‘She won’t,’ Stuart said confidently. ‘Anyroad, if she does, so what? It ain’t hurting her, it’s helping.’
‘How d’you work that out?’
‘Look, she don’t want to go all the way, frightened of finding herself pregnant; and she’s right to worry because I think her old man would kill the pair of us. This way I don’t have to push her.’
‘Tressa wouldn’t see it that way,’ Mike said, shaking his head.
‘You sleep with Tressa,’ Steve pointed out.
‘Well, we’re engaged.’
‘I ain’t going down that route, mate,’ Stuart replied quickly. ‘Have fun while you’re young, that’s me. But I don’t think it would stop me if I was engaged, or even married.’
‘Talk sense, man.’
‘Look,’ Stuart explained, ‘you can’t do nothing to stop having kids, can you, cos the Pope says so. Well, I wouldn’t want a houseful of kids and a wife like an old hag. Some of these women having a baby every year and living hand to mouth would take it as a bonus to have their old man dip his wick elsewhere once in a while, I’ll tell you.’
Steve thought about that. Next door to them lived Bob and Chrissie Roberts. They’d been married thirteen years and Chrissie was pregnant with her tenth child. All the children were pitifully thin, dressed in rags and usually barefoot, and Steve had heard them crying with hunger and cold.
And countless times he’d heard Chrissie pleading with Bob to leave her alone and the resultant slaps and thumps and punches, followed by her muffled moans and the rhythmic thump, thump, thump of their bedhead against the wall, and later in the quiet of the night he’d often hear Chrissie sobbing.
The young, once beautiful girl was gone for good. Her golden locks were dark, lank and greasy and her skin had lost its earlier bloom and was heavily lined and sallow and thin. Added to that, her body was
shapeless and she’d lost a lot of teeth. And the woman was too poor and wretched to take joy in anything. Would you want that for any woman you married? No, by God you wouldn’t.
So, when Stuart said, ‘Seems to me the church has you by the balls every which way, and I’ll go on the way I’ve always done, wife or no wife, and no bloody church will tell me different,’ Steve could see the reasoning behind it.
‘Well, I have no wife, no girlfriend, no nothing,’ Steve said. ‘And I’m not doing without female company a minute longer. Are you coming along with us, Mike, or are you not?’
Mike shook his head, and the other men laughed. ‘Suit yourself,’ Steve said, and with a wave they were gone.
‘You said it would be all right,’ Tressa said accusingly to Mike as they wandered arm in arm down Colmore Row.
Mike was still getting to grips with the news that his lovely, beautiful Tressa was carrying his child, and yet he knew she had a right to be angry with him. He had promised she’d be all right and that he would see to it. He knew he couldn’t wear anything to prevent pregnancy, the Church’s teaching was clear, but he’d intended to pull out before any damage was done. He hadn’t realised how difficult that would be, how carried away he’d become, so that he’d be virtually unable to do that. So the condition Tressa was in was entirely his fault.
He wasn’t aware she was crying until he felt her shoulders shaking. ‘Don’t cry, pet,’ he said, ‘please don’t.’ He turned her away from the city centre into one of the deserted side roads and kissed her gently. ‘Now,’ he said, facing her. ‘You are sure about this?’
Tressa nodded her head. ‘My monthlies were due a week after we became engaged, but nothing happened and it’s been the same this month, and it’s nearly the
end of March now.’ She looked at Mike and added, ‘It must have happened that first time.’
Bugger
! thought Mike, and he knew it must have. That time he was so buoyed up with the culmination of his dreams, and drunk with lust as much as the drinks he’d consumed, he could no more have stopped than he could have turned back the tide, and this was the result. ‘We’ll get married sooner rather than later, that’s all,’ he said reassuringly.
‘We haven’t money enough,’ Tressa cried. ‘Where will we live and everything?’
‘Look, Tressa, many start with less and manage,’ Mike told her. ‘We have a bit saved between us and I know you’ve been picking up bits and pieces in the market. I’ll put in for any overtime going and as long as you are feeling all right you can work a wee while yet, till the wedding at least.’
‘Where will we live?’
‘We might have to stay with my mom and dad for now,’ Mike said.
Tressa gave a shiver of distaste. Mike’s parents were almost as bad as Steve’s and Mike’s two sisters also adored their baby brother. They’d resented Tressa from the beginning, sensing how Mike felt about her. They were too clever to do this in front of Mike, when they were icily polite, but they had plenty of opportunity to give digs and make comments to show Tressa she wasn’t welcome in their family. Tressa never complained about this to Mike, for she knew the high regard he held his family in and she told herself it was Mike she loved and was marrying, not his family. But then she’d never envisaged living with them.
Mike, catching sight of her face by the light from the lamppost, said quite sharply, ‘It’s no good looking like that, Tressa. It’s my parents or the streets as far as I can see just now.’
‘I know, I’m sorry. It’s just not what I imagined.’
‘D’you think I did?’ Mike snapped, and then he put his arms around Tressa. ‘God, I’m sorry,’ he said, kissing her gently. ‘I’m a brute yelling at you. It’s all my fault, because I know you would have waited.’
Tressa knew Mike spoke the truth. However hard it was, she would have held out to keep her virginity till the wedding night if Mike hadn’t wanted it so much. That first night, the night of the engagement, she’d done it fearfully to please him, because she knew he expected it, and she’d been totally bowled over by the experience. Few of the women she had spoken to had mentioned any enjoyment they got from sex, never mind the exhilarating, mind-blowing rapture Tressa had felt. After that first time she’d been as anxious to repeat the experience as Mike was, and so she said, ‘No, I loved you too much to want to wait.’
‘Well,’ Mike said with a rueful grin. ‘See where our loving has got us both?’
‘Aye.’
‘You’ve had time to think and worry about this,’ Mike said. ‘To me it’s like a bolt from the blue. Who else have you told?’
‘No one,’ Tressa said. ‘But I think Lizzie suspects. I’ve been sick a few times in the morning, you see. I’ve even seen Pat and Betty looking at me oddly a time or two. But they’ve said nothing and neither have I.’
‘We need to get things organised,’ Mike decided. ‘I
think we should tell Mom and Dad straight away.’
Tressa quailed inside at the thought of that and yet she knew they’d have to know, and fast, for a wedding had to be arranged speedily. ‘What about my mammy and daddy?’ she asked suddenly. ‘They’ll have to give permission; I’m not twenty till July. I’ll have to tell them face to face. We’ll have to go over on a flying visit.’
‘First things first,’ Mike said. ‘Let’s tell my parents tonight and at least get that over and done with.’
‘She looked at me like I was some sort of slag,’ Tressa cried later to the three girls grouped about the bed. ‘She said…she said it…it was all my fault; that…that I’d trapped her son, snared him in some way.’ She looked at them all, her face red and awash with tears, twisting a sodden handkerchief in her agitated hands. ‘It wasn’t like that. Mike and I love each other.’
None of the girls were surprised. Mothers seemed to care more for sons than daughters and they all knew how Mike’s family behaved towards Tressa for she’d told them bits before, but now wasn’t the time to remind her of that.
‘Come on, bab. Don’t take on,’ Betty said. ‘These things happen. She’s likely in shock.’
‘At least your man’s standing by you,’ Pat added. ‘That’s summat today.’
‘That’s not all,’ Tressa said. ‘She says we can’t stay with them. That she’d never live with the shame and that she’s writing to her brother Arthur and his wife Doreen, to see if we can live there after the wedding. I don’t even know the man and he lives in Longbridge.’
‘Where’s that?’ Lizzie asked.
‘Bloody miles away,’ Pat said. ‘You don’t even know these people?’
‘No, but apparently they’ve always had a soft spot for Mike,’ Tressa said. ‘They had four daughters all growing up when Mike was a boy and he used to go and stay with them both. Mike told me this Arthur always wanted him to go into the car industry with him, but Mike said he’d have to live with them and he knew his parents would have been hurt. And,’ she added bitterly, ‘then they might have been. Now, they can’t get rid of him quick enough, and God alone knows what my parents will say when we go over and tell them.’
‘So, if they agree, you’ll go to live in Longbridge?’ Lizzie asked, and suddenly realised how she would miss her cousin. They’d lived only a few miles apart since they’d been born and had lived in the hotel together for two years. They almost knew the secrets of each other’s soul.
But, she told herself, this was no time to think of herself. There was a wedding to arrange, and hurried forward or not, Lizzie was determined to do all she could to make the day a wonderful one for Tressa and one she could think back on with pride.
Saturday, 14th June 1932, and the wedding reception, held in the back room of The Bell, was in full swing. Lizzie had worked hard to keep her promise to make this a day to remember, but she doubted Tressa would look back on it with any sort of pride, though she’d probably remember the glowering looks Mike’s sisters and parents cast in her direction.
But then Tressa’s parents, though they had been bitterly disappointed with Tressa when she and Mike had gone over to tell them they had to get married and speedily, were inclined to blame Mike. Before Tressa had gone to England she’d never even dated a boy, never mind kissed one. And now!
‘The man must have taken advantage of her,’ Eamon said. ‘She was young and innocent and had her heart turned.’
‘Well at least he’ll marry her,’ Margaret had said with a sigh of relief.
When they came over and saw the fawning way Mike’s parents and sisters behaved towards him, they’d been even more incensed, and when the two families had to speak to each other you could almost feel the disdainful animosity between them.
Lizzie wished she could tell them both to behave, for Tressa and Mike’s sakes, if for no one else’s. Neither of the two young people had meant to hurt and disappoint anyone, they had just let their feelings overwhelm them. It wasn’t as if they’d never intended to get married, for goodness’ sake.
Tressa, far from enjoying her day, seemed to be constantly agitated, buffeted as she was between her parents and her new in-laws. Lizzie came upon her in tears in the hall a few minutes after she’d seen Mike’s mother speak sharply to her about something. ‘For God’s sake, Tressa, stop crying,’ she said impatiently. ‘Don’t you see it’s what the old cow wants?’
‘I never knew you were so unfeeling.’
‘I never knew you were so feeble,’ Lizzie retorted. ‘For God’s sake. You wanted Mike and you’ve got him.
You know, whenever it was done, Mike’s mother would never have fallen on your neck in gratitude. Here,’ she said, pulling a compact from her bag, ‘wash your face and put this under your eyes to hide the puffiness, pinch your cheeks to give them colour, paint a smile right across your face and go and talk to Mike’s Uncle Arthur.’
Lizzie liked Arthur and Doreen. She saw they thought a lot of Mike, but in an understanding type of way, not as if he was a creature from another, and much superior, planet. They didn’t even seem that shocked about the pregnancy. ‘In my day, young girls were chaperoned a bit more,’ Doreen said. ‘And even then…takes you by surprise, those feelings, and when young people are alone so much, well, it’s human nature really, isn’t it? They were engaged, after all, and you just have to look at them to see they are made for each other.’
And they were. Despite the atmosphere of the place and the families grouped on opposite sides of the hall, their love for each other shone and sparkled between them.
All in all, Lizzie thought, Tressa had fallen on her feet. Mike’s uncle had told her he was a sort of boss in the car factory at Longbridge and had already secured Mike a job on the assembly line. He also had a large terraced house, where there were two rooms downstairs and a breakfast room/kitchen and they said Tressa and Mike were to be given one of the rooms downstairs for themselves, and were to have one of the four bedrooms on the first floor.
‘When the nipper’s old enough, there’s two attic
rooms above,’ Arthur told Tressa. ‘Plenty of room for all of us. Tell you the truth, me and Doreen have rattled about in the old house since the girls grew up and moved on, and Doreen at least will be glad of the company. She’s that excited about a baby in the house, and I’ll be glad to get Mike out the brass industry, I’ll tell you.’
‘But it’s so far away,’ Tressa complained to Lizzie.
‘You’ll soon settle down,’ Lizzie said. ‘How far was this place from Ballintra and we settled here fine.’
‘Aye, but we had each other.’
‘And now you have Mike and an uncle and aunt who’ll welcome you, and soon a wee baby too, all of your very own. You won’t be lonely then, and you’ll be too busy to blow your nose, never mind miss anyone.’
And so she could reassure her cousin, but she knew that when Tressa left there would be a gaping hole in her own life. When, later that evening, Arthur said to her, ‘You’ll miss Tressa,’ she could do nothing but nod her head, because she couldn’t trust herself to speak.
She was glad Pat and Betty had been invited, but not that keen to see Steve, who’d been Mike’s best man. It was the first time she had seen him since that awful business in February, when he’d taken a swing at the policeman, and she knew by the glares he was casting her that he hadn’t forgotten either.
Tressa had said that, according to Mike, Steve had taken up with someone called Stuart Fellows, and Lizzie supposed he was the man keeping Steve company at the bar. She wasn’t terribly impressed with him, but
she told herself it was none of her business if Steve Gillespie went about with a man from Mars. Anyway, she’d probably not see Steve again when this day was over, and that would suit her just fine.
‘You should have dropped dead with the look that old woman’s giving you,’ Betty said suddenly, and Lizzie glanced up. ‘Oh, that’s Steve’s mother,’ she said. ‘Flo was never keen on me, and Mike told Tressa she blames me for Steve getting locked up that night in February.’
Betty remembered the night well, and Lizzie went on, ‘Tressa said some of the neighbours gave her a hard time about it, but most of that was her own fault. I mean, she’s been blowing Steve’s trumpet for years. You name it, he had it and in dollops, far more than any other boy born this side of paradise, and that understandably put a lot of women’s backs up. They must have thought when they read in the papers that he’d been charged, for assaulting a policeman no less, and for being drunk and disorderly and causing an affray, they had something to make Flo squirm with for a change, pay her back for her bragging. I can’t say I blame them.’
‘How does Steve feel?’
‘I don’t know and don’t really care.’ Lizzie said emphatically.
‘He seems near welded to the bar with that other fellow.’
‘Aye,’ Lizzie said.
As the girls were discussing Steve, so he was saying to Stuart, ‘I was crazy about her, you know.’
‘I can understand it. She’s a looker,’ Stuart said.
Steve shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I mean, when
I remember the prison cell and all. God, she did nothing, she just stood at the attic window of that hotel and watched them dragging me away. She didn’t come down and say it was partly her damned fault. Part of me can’t ever forget that.’
‘Put her out of your head, mate,’ Stuart advised. ‘She’s bad news.’
‘That’s it. I can’t,’ Steve said. ‘Despite it all, I still love her like mad. I don’t know why either.’ He didn’t go on to say that when Lizzie had told him it was over he’d wanted to die. You didn’t share that, even with a mate. He’d think you’d gone soft in the head.
Steve looked across the room. Lizzie was still wearing her bridesmaid’s dress of peach-coloured satin with the long lacy sleeves, and she looked breathtaking. The headdress was gone and her hair was drawn up into an elegant chignon, showing her slender neck, and he felt the blood pound in his brain.
He knew he had to at least talk to her. If he lost this opportunity he’d probably never get another and he’d always regret it.
‘Oh God, Steve’s coming over,’ Lizzie said to Betty.