The Old House on the Corner (27 page)

‘I think I must do. I miss the certainty of you. Steve said today that his wife had become part of him, so I suppose you’ve become part of me – and me of you.’

‘That’s a rather odd thing for Steve to say,’ Michael remarked drily. ‘Funny conversations you two are having.’

‘He feels guilty for leaving her. Apparently, she’s not stopped crying since he went.’ For the very first time, she wondered if she would have given Steve a second glance if Michael had been able to make love to her like a normal man. ‘I’m terribly mixed up,’ she told him.

‘You’re not the only one. By the way, our son rang this evening. He wants his mum and dad to come to Denmark in September for the weekend.’

‘Did you tell him about us?’

‘No, I thought you could do that, Kath. You can explain it better than me. Will we go together, or is that just not on?’

‘Oh, Lord, Michael, I’ve no idea.’ She doubted if Steve would take lightly to her going away with her husband when she was making such a fuss about him seeing his supposedly sick wife.

Michael was speaking again, but she had to break in. ‘I’m sorry, I have to go.’ She put the receiver down with a crash. Steve had come into the room. If he’d noticed she’d been on the phone, he didn’t say, or perhaps didn’t care. He just grabbed her hands, pulled her feet, and carried her into the bedroom.

‘I’m going to make love to you all night long,’ he said in a voice husky with passion. His big hands caressed her
breasts and almost met around her waist when he squeezed it. She shuddered with ecstasy and just lay there while he touched every part of her then did the same with his lips, bringing her body to the very peak of trembling delight until everything exploded and she tumbled back to earth with a rapturous cry.

Then she did the same to him.

The Burrows had been watching a video. Anna liked musicals best, or anything that made her laugh or cry. Tonight they’d seen
Once Upon a Time in America
, a film so hauntingly beautiful that even the cynical Ernest had felt moved. Almost four hours long, it was past midnight when he realized the curtains hadn’t been drawn.

‘The lights are on in the empty bungalow,’ he announced. ‘There’s a woman putting up the curtains.’

Anna immediately demanded he turn her chair around so she could see. ‘She looks quite young. Go over there, Ernie,’ she said imperiously, ‘introduce yourself and ask if she’d like a cup of tea. You never know, the gas and electricity mightn’t be turned on yet.’

‘There aren’t many things I wouldn’t do for you, luv, but that’s one of ’em. I’ve no intention of introducing meself to anyone at half past twelve in the morning. If she wants a drink, she’ll have brought a flask.’ He drew their own curtains quickly before the woman noticed them staring.

‘Sometimes, Ernie,’ Anna complained, ‘you can be not very nice. The poor woman might not have anywhere to sleep. I haven’t seen a furniture van arrive.’

‘Are you suggesting I go and offer her a bed for the night?’ Ernie smiled and raised his bushy white eyebrows. ‘I might end up in jail like that Rees-James
geezer. “Eighty-one-year-old man accused of propositioning woman young enough to be his daughter.” Might even be granddaughter.’

‘Talking about that Rees-James creature, you were awfully brave this morning, Ernie.’

Ernest wriggled uncomfortably. ‘You said that before, luv, at least half a dozen times.’ Sarah Rees-James had come over in the afternoon with the children to thank him profusely. He’d had to kiss the little girl’s teddy bear and Anna had made a show of herself the way she drooled over the baby. He’d been thankful to see the back of them.

‘Made quite a few quid today on the horses,’ he said.

‘Did you, darling?’

‘Thought we could go out tomorrow and buy one of them computers you’re after.’

‘Oh, Ernie,’ Anna cried. ‘You are an absolutely perfect husband.’

He grinned. ‘Your wish is my command.’

‘But will we know what sort to buy, darling?’

‘I wondered if we could take Victoria with us? She’s not working at the moment. She’ll advise us and we can treat her to a meal.’

Anna clapped her hands. ‘I’m already looking forward to it.’

So was Ernie. It would make a pleasant change to their rather dull, uneventful lives.

Not long afterwards they went to bed. He fell asleep immediately and began to dream about the time when their lives had been anything but dull …

It was a long time, years later, when Ernest realized that the man was his dad. His name was Desmond Whitely and he was tall, slim, and very handsome, with straight, white-blond hair and dazzling blue eyes. He came to see Mam every Friday on his way home from work. Mam called him ‘Des’ and used to cry when he left. Des was better dressed than all the other men Ernest knew. He wore a suit and a collar and tie. The suit had frayed cuffs and his well-polished shoes were worn down at the heels, but he still looked dead posh. The first finger of his right hand had a dark blue stain that Mam said was ink.

‘He’s a bookkeeper,’ she said proudly.

Des always came with a little gift for Ernest: a magic painting book, a drawing pad, a box of crayons, a wind-up toy. He would give Mam money before he said tara, always using exactly the same words, ‘I only wish it were more, Peggy, but I’ve got three more mouths to feed.’

‘It’s all right, Des,’ Mam would say. ‘I know you do your best.’

Every now and then, Des would turn up with a paper bag that contained clothes for Ernest. ‘Our George has grown out of these, I thought they’d do for the little chap.’

Ernest was always referred to as ‘the little chap’.
When he was very small, Des would jiggle him up and down on his knee and say what a fine little chap he was. ‘Just like his dad,’ he would chuckle.

‘Just like his dad,’ Mam would echo.

Mam and Ernest lived in a small upstairs room at the back of a terraced house in Chaucer Street, Bootle, only a stone’s throw from the docks and the River Mersey. It had a gas fire, a gas ring, and a gas mantle on the ceiling, and was so full of furniture there was hardly room to turn around – the little table they ate on had to be moved to open the door and there was only one chair, so Ernest always sat on the bed. The window overlooked a dirty backyard where the lavatory was. Mam and Ernie hardly ever used the lavvy, preferring the po that was kept under the bed. Every morning, very early, before the O’Briens who lived downstairs were up, Mam would empty the po in the lavvy and at the same time fetch a huge pan of water from the kitchen that would last all day – the O’Briens resented having to let out their back bedroom and weren’t very polite to their lodgers so Mam always made herself as invisible as possible.

On the occasions when there was no money for the meter and it was cold as well as dark, they would cuddle up in bed together and Mam would tell Ernest stories about when she was young – not that she was all that old now. She’d had Ernest when she was only seventeen.

She’d been born in a big house in Merton Road, only a mile away. Her mother had been the live-in cook and her father a seaman in the Merchant Navy who her mam had met one Christmas when she’d gone to the music hall.

‘They sat next to each other and it was love at first
sight,’ Mam said. ‘His name was Charlie Burrows and they got married the next time his ship came in.’ Her mam had managed to stick it out as a cook until a second child was born when she’d felt obliged to leave and had rented the bottom half of a house in Clifford Street.

‘Me dad didn’t exactly earn a fortune, but we had enough to eat and he brought us home lovely things from places like Turkey and Persia.’

‘What sort of lovely things?’ Ernest would ask, although he already knew the answer.

‘Sweets and dried fruit, scarves and stuff.’

Mam was eleven when the Great War started and twelve when her dad’s ship was sunk with the loss of all hands in a storm in the Black Sea.

‘Is the water really black, Mam?’

‘Yes, Ernie,’ Mam replied with conviction, ‘as black as night.’

According to Mam, Ernest’s own dad had died in the final year of the Great War. Ernie wasn’t old enough to know this couldn’t be true. He was born in 1920 and the war had ended two years before. It wasn’t until he was about ten that the penny dropped – three pennies to be precise: he was too young for his father to have died in the war; if Mam had been married then her name would have changed from Burrows to something else; Ernest had the same coloured hair and eyes as Des Whitely, who was almost certainly his dad. Hadn’t Des remarked how alike they were on more than one occasion?

None of this seemed the least bit strange to Ernest. He didn’t wonder why Mam never went to see her own mam and the five brothers and sisters who only lived a few streets away.

While he wasn’t perfectly happy, he was happy enough. He loved his mam with all his heart and didn’t doubt that she loved him back. She never smacked him or raised her voice and they would roll their eyes at each other whenever the O’Briens downstairs had one of their frequent rows and the whole street would echo to their screams.

‘Some people!’ she would say exasperatedly, her head bent over a knitting pattern. Mam knitted for a living – or, as Des put it, she was a professional knitter, which sounded terribly grand. People would place their orders at Martha’s, the little wool shop in Marsh Lane, buying the wool and the pattern at the same time, and Mam would deliver the finished garment within a few days if she wasn’t busy and the pattern was a plain one. It would take longer if she already had several orders or the customer wanted a Fair Isle jumper making or something in a complicated stitch and her charges would go up accordingly.

One of Ernest’s abiding memories would be of winter evenings, the curtains drawn, him lying on the bed drawing or reading, while his pretty mam sat in front of the gas fire, needles flashing, whatever she was knitting having grown magically longer every time he looked.

Apart from various pennies dropping, another important thing happened when Ernest was ten. Mam got a job as a housekeeper and they left the room in Chaucer Street and went to live around the corner in Sea View Road where the houses were much bigger and Ernest had a room of his own.

The house belonged to Cuthbert Burtonshaw, who had a chandler’s shop in Marsh Lane that sold not only hardware, but things like animal food and firewood,
crockery, and dusty, secondhand books that were in boxes outside and hastily brought in if it started to rain. The shop was a little gold mine and recently Cuthbert had bought a second-hand car: a Model A Ford.

Cuthbert was a widower approaching sixty. His face was very fat and red, contrasting oddly with the rest of him, as he was quite thin and his big head made him look top heavy. He had a bush of wiry grey hair, mutton chop whiskers, and a grown-up son and daughter, Vernon and Hilda, both married, who resented Ernest’s mam right from the start.

‘She’s not dusted the sideboard properly,’ Hilda said one Sunday when she came to visit her father – she found something to complain about every time she came. Ernest used to sit on the stairs and listen. ‘See, Dad, there’s dust underneath the clock.’

‘Peggy’s all right,’ Cuthbert replied good-naturedly – he was a good-natured man all round and Ernest liked him tremendously. ‘She looks after me fine and she’s a decent cook. That nipper of hers, Ernie, is dead bright. He can read and write better than I can.’

‘Our Dicky can read and write an’ all, Dad.’

‘Yes, but not as good as Ernie.’

Mam cooked the meals, did the washing and shopping, and kept the house sufficiently clean and tidy to suit Cuthbert. He was a lonely man and liked her and Ernest to keep him company of an evening. They would listen to the wireless or Cuthbert would teach Ernest to play chess or they’d just read, although Mam couldn’t read very well and usually got on with the knitting that she still did in her spare time. Cuthbert was dead chuffed when she made him a Fair Isle pullover.

It wasn’t long after the pullover that Ernest was
woken up in the middle of the night by a shrill scream followed by, ‘Get off me! How dare you! I’ll be leaving this house first thing in the morning.’

He jumped out of bed and raced into his mother’s room, where Cuthbert, wearing striped pyjamas buttoned to the neck, was standing at the foot of the bed almost in tears.

‘I’m sorry, Peg,’ he stammered. ‘I thought … I thought … I don’t know what I thought.’

‘Whatever you thought, you were dead wrong. Go away, Cuthbert. I’m going to start packing right now. Look, you’ve woken our Ernie. Come here, luv. Did you get a fright?’

Eventually, Ernest went back to bed, satisfied that Mam was no longer in danger. He was never sure what happened between him falling asleep and waking up, but Mam never left the house in Sea View Road and a month later she and Cuthbert Burtonshaw got married, much to the ire of Vernon and Hilda who refused to come to the wedding.

Within a year, Ernest’s half-sister, Gaynor, was born, and Charlie arrived eighteen months later. Cuthbert claimed to have never been so happy as he was with Mam and his new family – including Ernest, of course.

Unfortunately, Cuthbert wasn’t to enjoy his happiness for long. Charlie was barely a year old when his father fell off the ladder in the shop while reaching for something off the top shelf and knocked himself out. Sadly, he never regained consciousness and died the following day.

Mam was upset, naturally. She’d liked Cuthbert, although she’d never loved him. She feared for her
children. ‘What’s going to happen to us now?’ she asked Ernest.

Ernest had no idea. Life was full of ups and downs and people had to cope as best they could.

Vernon and Hilda came back to the house after the funeral. ‘We’d like you out of here forthwith,’ Hilda said crisply.

Mam looked at Ernest. ‘What does that mean, son?’

‘It means straight away.’ He’d never heard of the word ‘forthwith’ before, but got the meaning. He was struck by a brilliant idea. ‘Why can’t me mam just rent the house like Cuthbert did?’ he asked. They could afford it. In a few months, he was due to leave school and start work, the house was big enough to let out a couple of rooms, and Mam could start knitting fulltime again.