So Biddy had cycled round there and added her name to what looked like a rather lengthy list.
‘You’re at Mrs Tebbit’s?’ Mrs Freddy had said, however. She shook her head sadly. ‘Oh dear me! Well, even if I don’t have a vacancy I’ll see whether I can find you somewhere else. Those Tebbits!’
She left it at that but Biddy, cycling back to the shop, had felt a warm glow. She would escape from the Tebbits, either with or without Mrs Freddy, but it would be pleasant to feel she had an ally, someone else who wanted to help her.
But now, however, she had come down to earth. She would light her paraffin stove, make her French toast and a nice cup of tea, and then get into bed to keep warm and read her new book. The Tebbit household did not run to oil lamps upstairs, but Biddy had a supply of candles hidden away and one of them would last her until she grew too tired to read and wanted only to sleep.
She turned her bicycle into the entry down which she could reach the Tebbits’ back yard. She kept her bicycle there, chained and with a strong padlock on the back wheel, but so far no one had ventured to interfere with it. As she secured the bicycle the snow, which had stopped for a while, started up again. Slow, lazy flakes at first, gradually growing thicker. Good weather to be out of, Biddy concluded, legging it for the back door. She burst into the kitchen to find the family assembled there, seemingly in accord for once. They were chattering and laughing, the fire blazed up and for once a reasonable smell of cooking came from the oven let into the wall beside the fire.
‘Oh … sorry, I didn’t realise you were in here,’ Biddy said above the din. ‘I’d have come through the front door if I’d known.’
‘S’orlright, chuck,’ Ray Tebbit said. He was a seaman, not home often, and Biddy always felt sorry for him because it seemed hard to come home from the sort of life she believed sailors lived, not to family comfort and good cheer but to the noisy quarrelling and frequent fights of the rest of the Tebbit clan.
Still, they all seemed happy enough tonight. There were chestnuts roasting on a coal shovel and the miserable Jane was toasting a crumpet, actually smiling as she shielded her face from the flames.
They must be celebrating Ray’s return, Biddy thought, climbing quickly up the stairs. What a pity they aren’t a pleasant crowd – how nice it would be to be part of a family again. Still, Ellen’s Mam had asked her to spend Christmas Day with them, that was something to look forward to, and because of a general feeling of goodwill to all men at this time of year, her tips were building up once more. The lump in the pillow was quite uncomfortable some nights, when she turned over without care.
In her own room, Biddy tipped a good supply of paraffin into her stove and lit it. She left the door a little ajar, hoping that it would clear the fumes and make it unnecessary to open the window, then she took off her coat, hat, scarf and gloves and laid her groceries out on the edge of the bed. She was hanging her coat on the hook of the door when she remembered her tips; best put them in the lump at once, before she forgot them. She did not intend to leave them in her coat pocket all night, though really they would be pretty safe. No one ever came into her room when she was in residence.
She slid the money out of her pocket, counted it, then went over to the bed. She pulled her pillow out from under Dolly and her fingers found the neat slit in the seam. She pushed her hand in amongst the feathers, feeling for the lump. It wasn’t there, but she always pushed it right down, well out of view and feel.
It took her all of five minutes to acknowledge the awful truth.
Her savings had disappeared.
The ship was iced up worse than Dai had ever known it and a heavy swell was running, so when the black frost began to rise from the water everyone had been too busy to notice it. You can’t see black frost, but you can feel it; it is black frost which causes each breath you take to include tiny particles of ice, and ice in the lungs can kill a man.
But Dai kept his muffler round his mouth and nose, and he kept his great heavy gauntlets on, too. Because he – and every other man aboard who could be spared – was chopping ice. Desperately, with all their strength, they were chopping at the ice which had already all but immobilised the ship.
The trouble was, Dai knew, that a heavy sea which came inboard time after time, froze solid between each wave, so that the ship was becoming layered in ice which weighed her down in the water until her usual buoyant forward movement became little more than an uneasy wallow.
Clear the ice or die. Get her free of it or see her turn turtle … it’s the last thing you’ll see as you gasp the iced air into your lungs for the last time.
They all knew the truth of it, all dreaded it. So they used picks and shovels and they battered and beat at the ice. Even the laziest man on board was galvanised into action. Greasy raised his pick and brought it down and diamonds flew across the deck, first small, then impossibly huge, koh-i-noors, every one.
‘You’re doin’ fine, Grease,’ Dai said through his muffler. ‘We’ll clear the whaleback in ten minutes – look at the masts!’
The masts were beautiful, slender candy sticks, blue-white and elegant. Dai felt he could have snapped one off and eaten it … but the masts, too, must be cleared before any man aboard could go off watch.
‘Aye. Like a woman, beautiful but deadly,’ Greasy said thickly. ‘Hey up, look ’oo’s ’ere!’
It was the Skipper. He was of little use on the bridge; you cannot con a motionless vessel, so he had come to lend his strength to the ice-clearing party. Side by side with them, strength for strength, he worked all that long afternoon, until the
Bess
began to answer to the helm, to take on the seas at their own game, to respond.
‘She’ll live,’ the Mate said at last. He stood back to let the crew go below first, then had to hack at his boot with his pick-axe because it had frozen to the deck in those few seconds. The crew began to shuffle down the companion-way, too tired to push and shove, to joke and blaspheme as they usually did, and the Mate followed them, talking as he came. ‘She’s a grand little ship, the
Bess
.’
‘Obstinate little bitch, she wouldn’t let the ice turtle her,’ Colin said with affectionate pride. ‘Eh, put the wind up us, didn’t she though? Just like a bloody woman!’
‘Gives you an appetite, mun, ice-clearing do,’ Dai said with relish as they filed onto the mess deck. ‘That’s why the Skipper joined in, ’tweren’t to give us a hand like, ’twas to get himself ready for Bandy’s beef stew and dumplings.’
They all laughed. Bandy, the cook, was popular with everyone because he could cook in a raging arctic storm, his bread always rose and filled the small ship with its delicate, delicious smell and he made pancakes which a master chef would have envied – made them, what was more, with a heavy swell running and his stove moving up and down in rhythm whilst pans and pots flew through the air and thumped anyone standing in the galley.
‘Never known the ice as bad as that,’ Greasy remarked as he sat down at the table and plonked his plate of stew down in front of him. ‘We’ve done a year on distant water, but we’ve never known ice that bad, have we, Taff?’
‘Nor me,’ Colin said. ‘And this is my third year.’
There were murmurs of assent all round the room. ‘Aye, it were pretty bad.’ ‘You don’t often get it that thick on the masts.’ ‘It’s always bad wi’ a black frost, but that ’un beggars description.’
Dai nodded and attacked his stew. He ate it with relish, enjoying the new bread which accompanied it almost as much as the meal itself. Afterwards there was stewed apples and custard, after that coffee, hot and strong, in thick white cups.
‘On watch, we are, in three hours,’ he said to Greasy presently, as they sat back, replete. ‘Let’s get some shut-eye.’
They went to their bunks, took off their sea-boots and rolled into their blankets. Dai usually slept like a log the moment his head touched the pillow, but not tonight. Tonight his thoughts refused to let him sleep. They played round and round the scene out on the deck, with the old man giving the ice hell and every one of the crew working like devils, no one slacking, stopping for a rest, complaining. They had all known it was a race against time and they worked as a team until the sweat froze on them and their hands were covered in bleeding blisters.
He was never bored on the
Bess
, though he was often frightened, nearly always tired. But that had been a narrow escape, that icing up, he knew it by Colin’s face, by the Mate’s relief as he watched them go down the companionway, by the Skipper’s mere presence on deck. I wish Mam were alive, she’d understand why I love it, why I’ll keep coming back, he told himself wistfully. Da would have understood once, but not any more. All he can see, now, is Menna’s white young body and the brassy yellow hair of her, all he can see is Davy Evans having his way with a woman young enough to be his daughter. He won’t be interested in his son, not yet awhile.
But Bethan would have loved to hear about the
Bess
, would have understood. And suddenly, he wanted to talk to a woman, not a girl who would smile and kiss him and be willing or unwilling to go to bed with him but a woman, a motherly woman.
In the bunk beside his, Greasy sighed, then spoke. ‘Taffy? I t’ink I’d like to go ’ome when we get back this time. Not to Victoria Street but ’ome. To me Mam. To Liverpool.’
There was a wealth of longing in his voice and Dai could have hugged him because it wasn’t just he who had wanted a bit of mothering, Greasy did too.
‘Yeah, mun,’ Dai said, from under the blankets. ‘My Mam said to go and see her friend in Liverpool, her name’s Nellie Gallagher. If you go home, I’ll come with you and find Mrs Gallagher. She may not even know my
Mam’s dead, yet. I should have
visited, should have gone before. It was my Mam’s last wish, you could say.’
‘We’ll both go,’ Greasy said. His voice had deepened with exhaustion and the rapid approach of sleep. ‘We’ll both go, our Taff. Together.’
Biddy couldn’t believe it at first. All that money, just gone, and she always so careful to push the small cloth bag deep into the feathers before she left for work each morning. She searched the bedding, the surrounding floor, she even looked in the pockets of every garment she possessed, just in case she had sleepwalked around the room and stowed her precious savings somewhere different.
But it was not a big room; the most diligent of searches could take her no longer than half an hour and at the end of the time Biddy descended the stairs, cold fury in her heart. She stalked into the kitchen and when the family went on squabbling and laughing she banged her hand hard on the half-open kitchen door.
It had the desired effect. Voices broke off in mid-sentence and every head in the room swung towards her.
When she saw she had everyone’s attention, Biddy spoke, her voice hard. ‘Where’s my money?’
There was a short, uneasy silence. Mrs Tebbit was the first to break it. ‘Gone, chuck … you’ll owe again from tomorrer.’
‘Not my rent,’ Biddy said coldly. ‘My savings. I kept my savings in a little white cloth bag inside my pillow. I went to it just now and my money had gone, bag and all. Someone from here must have taken it and I want it back, smartish, or I’ll call the police.’
‘None of my family would touch your money,’ Mrs Tebbit said. Deep scarlet colour rose in her fat, lard-like cheeks. ‘Ow dare you say such a thing, you baggage!’
‘Who else would take it? Who else
could
?’ Biddy asked. ‘Strangers don’t wander in off the streets and go up to my room and fiddle around in there. But someone does, I’ve known someone goes in and picks over my things when I’m at work, someone uses my paraffin, but this is going too far.’ She stared at each one of them in turn, even giving the tatty, down-at-heel kids a long, chilly look. ‘I’m going upstairs, now. If my money isn’t handed back in the next ten minutes, I’m going down to the police station. I hope that’s clear?’
No one answered. Eyes darted about, but no one spoke. Biddy threw them one last look and left the room. She went upstairs slowly, hoping against hope that someone would follow her upstairs, slip that familiar little cloth bag into her palm. But no one did.
In her room again, Dolly lay in an abandoned attitude on top of the ravaged pillowcase. A few feathers, dumb witnesses to Biddy’s frantic search, floated lazily into the air as Biddy had opened the door, then settled slowly on floor and bed as the closing door cut off the draught once more.
Biddy waited for a good deal longer than ten minutes, but no one came clattering up the stairs, no one called her name, knocked, admitted the theft. Slowly, reluctantly, Biddy let the moments drift by, then she descended the stairs once more. At the foot she hesitated, then put her head round the kitchen door.
‘I’m off for the police,’ she said. ‘Shan’t be very long I don’t suppose. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to give me my savings back?’
She could tell by the looks on the faces that they knew who had robbed her, guessed that there had been harsh words exchanged, but they had obviously come to some sort of decision and it was clearly not to hand her money back.
‘No one ’ere’s got your filthy money,’ Mrs Tebbit said at last, her tone as surly and aggressive as the expression on her face. ‘Fancy you saltin’ away all that money – or tellin’ folk you ’ad, anyroad. Well, you’re gonna get your comeuppance now, milady, an’ no mistake, ’cos you’ve been pipped at the post. You say you’ll tell the scuffers – well, tell away. Two can play at that game and we’ll ’ave something to say an’ all. What about the money missin’ from me downstairs dresser, eh? Someone took it – oo’s to say it weren’t you, Miss ’Igh-an’-Mighty? Anyroad, our Jane went down to the cop-shop soon’s you left, and reported it, said it were possible our lodger ’ad been sticky-fingerin’ it So chances is you’ll be the one the scuffers wanna see!’
Biddy turned and left the room. She would go to the police, she would! As if they would believe a crowd of tatty, dirty Tebbits against Biddy O’Shaughnessy, who had never been wrong-sides of the law in her life! Though there was the flat … but that had been a long while ago and there had been no trouble. And there was poor Mr Bowker … he had been given a grand funeral and was buried in Ford cemetery, she and Ellen had taken flowers not all that long ago. Could any of this rebound on her? Of course it couldn’t, she would go to the police and she just hoped they threw all the Tebbits into prison, or sold their miserable possessions to force them to pay her back!