The Urchin's Song (34 page)

‘Happy, my darling?’ Oliver’s voice was soft and deep and now, as she turned to him, the look in his blue eyes made her quiver. They were to spend their wedding night in Oliver’s London house before leaving for a week’s honeymoon in France where one of Oliver’s friends had a château. They could have spent longer abroad but Josie was beginning a new season at Covent Garden beginning the third week of January, and so regretfully they had decided a week was all they could manage. ‘You look quite exquisite.’ Oliver stroked her flushed face before looking down at the ivory silk dress encrusted with hundreds and hundreds of tiny crystals across the low-cut bodice, and then back upwards to her golden-brown hair under its lacy veil. ‘Even the good Reverend Whear was mesmerised by your beauty. He nearly forgot his words, did you notice?’

‘Oh, Oliver.’ She smiled now, and he grinned back at her, suddenly very much her Oliver. Everything was going to be all right. Once this first night of marriage was over she would know what to expect and then it wouldn’t be so frightening. Women the whole world over survived this thing that happened once the lights were out, and most of them loved their husbands. Look at the Queen - she had been devoted to her Albert and utterly devastated by his death, and they had had nine children. She had openly idolised him, and he her, so this . . . activity couldn’t be that bad, could it?

It wasn’t. A little painful perhaps on the first night and certainly somewhat embarrassing, but Oliver’s gentleness and restrained passion, along with his almost reverent adoration, had even made that night enjoyable. And as the honeymoon progressed in the wonderful old château where they were waited on hand and foot by Oliver’s friend’s old retainers, Josie blossomed under her husband’s skilful and experienced lovemaking.

They arrived home in England, tired but happy, on a very wet and windy January evening, and Gertie, who had her own quarters now in Oliver’s house, had opened the door and run down the steps to greet them as though Josie had been away for a month instead of a week.

It was some time later after they had enjoyed the excellent homecoming dinner Mrs Wilde had prepared, and the maids had cleared away the dishes, and Josie and Oliver along with Gertie were sitting in front of the roaring drawing-room fire, that Josie said, ‘Is anything wrong, Gertie? There is something, isn’t there? What is it, lass?’

‘I wasn’t going to say anything tonight what with you just coming home, but . . .’ Gertie hesitated. ‘It’s a bit of a shock but Pearl, she’s gone.’

‘Gone? Gone where?’

‘She died, Josie. The day after you went to France.’

‘She
died
?’ Josie was aware of the crackling bright orange flames licking round the big log on the fire which Constance, one of the maids, had attended to some minutes before, and Oliver at the side of her saying, ‘Who is Pearl?’ but for a moment she was having a job taking the news in. Pearl had been young, so young and bonny; it seemed impossible that she was dead. She turned to Oliver. ‘Pearl is - was - Barney’s wife, Betty’s stepson.’

Gertie chimed in again, with, ‘I couldn’t believe it when I heard, an’ apparently all them back home got a gliff an’ all. No one realised she was so bad, you see.’

‘How old was this Pearl?’ Oliver asked quietly.

‘Only twenty-four or twenty-five,’ Josie said. ‘We’d invited them to the wedding, if you remember, but Barney wrote to say she was ill. I never realised it was anything so serious. Vera seemed to suggest it wasn’t much at all . . .’ Her voice trailed away. This was awful. Pearl had had her whole life in front of her. And her mam and da would be devastated. According to Betty, they’d built their life round Pearl. And Barney - how would he be feeling? She could still hardly believe it. ‘Do we know the cause of death?’ she asked Gertie.

‘A disease of the blood, so Vera wrote. She . . . she started bleeding at the end apparently, from everywhere, an’ then she went into a coma an’ within a few hours she’d gone.’

‘It was in the newspapers in November last year that the blood is far more complicated than doctors had expected.’ Oliver stood up and walked across to the fire, standing with his back to the flames as he continued, ‘Three different blood groups have been identified by a scientist in Vienna, and he thinks this explains why different people react differently to blood transfusions among other things. Did your friend have transfusions?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’m so sorry, my dear.’ Oliver returned to the sofa and sat down, patting Josie’s arm as he spoke. ‘It is always so much worse when one hasn’t lived out the three score and ten.’

Josie nodded. She hadn’t liked Pearl and now she felt awful because she hadn’t.

‘Barney was the gentleman I met once at Vera’s house, wasn’t he?’ Oliver said after a moment or two.

Josie nodded again. ‘When you came up to Sunderland to see a friend of yours,’ she agreed.

‘I think we both know why I came up to Sunderland.’ He smiled and she half smiled back, but she felt shaken and disturbed. ‘What are the funeral arrangements?’ Oliver asked Gertie.

‘It’s tomorrow morning, early, so there’s no chance of going,’ Gertie said. ‘I let them all back home know that you two weren’t due back till late tonight so they don’t expect us.’

‘Thank you.’ Josie felt doubly guilty now as a sense of relief made itself known. She would have gone if there had been time but she wouldn’t have known what to say to Barney, or Prudence either for that matter. Prudence had thought the world of Pearl. She’d be absolutely heartbroken . . .

 

‘Well, lass, this took us all by surprise. I never thought that she wouldn’t get better, did you?’

Prudence shook her head. She knew Vera was wondering why she wasn’t more upset, and she
was
sorry Pearl had died, it was terrible, but she couldn’t pretend to something she didn’t feel. Not any more. Not with Vera. For years now she had squirmed at Pearl’s treatment of Barney, and only she knew how awful it had been in that house. Not that she wished Pearl dead, never that, but it had happened and that was that.

As they entered the church and took their seats, Prudence glanced across to where Barney was sitting, his head bowed and his hands joined as they hung down between his knees. Pearl’s parents were on one side of him and Betty on the other, but he appeared oblivious to anyone else.

‘First Shirley, then Frank and now this.’ Vera’s voice at the side of her brought Prudence’s head turning, and Horace - on Vera’s other side - nodded mournfully. ‘They say it goes in threes so please God this is an end to it. What say you, lass?’

‘Aye.’ Prudence nodded in her turn, and then she wondered what Vera would say if she came out with the truth and told her she was the happiest she’d ever been these days.

When she had first gone to live with Vera and Horace she knew it had been on sufferance. Oh, not that anything had been said, Vera was too nice for that, but she’d known all right. And it had been difficult, the first few weeks. Her hands had still been paining her a lot then, and she’d felt . . . Oh, she couldn’t have described to anyone how she’d felt in those dark days. She had prayed she wouldn’t wake up when she’d laid her head on the pillow more times than she could remember, and the river had beckoned to her more than once. It would be easy, she’d thought, just to let herself fall into the river and for the waters to close over her head and end all the struggling and heartache and pain. She’d spent hours in the little room designated to her; thinking, thinking, thinking until she’d felt she was going mad. She was never going to be married, never going to have bairns or be loved, never even have any real friends. She was an oddity, a freak, that’s what she was. And then, to put the tin lid on it, she’d come out in a rash all over her face and torso.

It had all come to a head that day she’d looked in the little hand mirror in her bedroom and seen the gargoyle she’d become looking back at her. At least that’s how she’d felt at the time. And she’d thrown the mirror to the floor where it had smashed into a hundred pieces, and Vera had come running up and thought she’d dropped it because of her hands and told her not to worry, she’d get another one. And she had screamed at Vera that she didn’t
want
another mirror! Why would anyone want to see what she saw when she looked in one? And then somehow she’d found herself in Vera’s arms sobbing her heart out and once started she hadn’t been able to stop. Horace had gone for the doctor when she was still crying an hour later, and he’d given her something to make her sleep. And Vera had been there when she’d woken up, and they had talked. For hours they’d talked. And everything had changed after that. She couldn’t remember her mam much but she couldn’t have thought more of her if she’d lived than she did Vera. That’s how she felt now. And Horace was kind. Oh, he was. And easygoing. He didn’t gripe about much, Horace.

‘Come as somethin’ of a bolt out of the blue to Barney an’ all.’ Vera was whispering as befitted the solemn occasion, and again Prudence nodded, whispering back, ‘He’ll be all right, Vera. It’s terrible, but it’s not as if he and Pearl were as close as you and Horace or anything, is it?’

‘No, no. You’re right there, lass. Aye, you are, an’ I’ve always said God works in mysterious ways.’

‘His wonders to perform,’ Horace chimed in.

‘What?’ Now Vera turned fully to him. ‘What are you on about?’

‘Isn’t that the next part of that verse? God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform?’

‘It might be.’ Vera clearly didn’t like being caught out on something she didn’t know, and she sniffed before she said, ‘But I would hardly call Pearl’s death a wonder, Horace.’

‘I wasn’t sayin’ that, now was I?’ He leaned forward, appealing to Prudence, who was secretly amused. These two were like a double act at times but now was not the time to smile. Poor Pearl. As Horace settled back in his seat, Prudence glanced at the back of Marjorie and Stanley’s heads. And her poor parents. But at least there were no little ones left motherless, that was something. And Pearl hadn’t bothered to come and see her in hospital when she’d first hurt her hands - and that was before she’d got ill. Barney had come, and he’d said Pearl found hospitals upsetting but that she’d sent her love. That day, Prudence had realised that she didn’t actually
want
Pearl to visit her, which had been a great surprise at the time.

Barney turned round once as the service began, his eyes searching out Prudence, and when she inclined her head at him he nodded back before facing the minister again. He was glad his sister was here. He hadn’t seen much of her since she had been living with Vera, and to his surprise he had found that he missed her. She was an intelligent lass, Prudence, and they’d had some good cracks together, but moreover he didn’t have to pretend with her. He knew that most people would cast him in the role of heartbroken husband, and respect for Pearl prevented him from telling the truth, but the pity and sympathy in people’s faces had him wanting to stand up and shout, ‘Don’t none of you feel sorry for me! Feel sorry for Pearl, aye, in as much as you would for any young life cut short, but not me.’

A stifled sob from Pearl’s mother at the side of him brought his head towards his mother-in-law, but she was staring rigidly ahead and did not glance at him. Barney had gleaned enough over the last years to know who he had to thank for Pearl being the way she was in the bedroom and out of it, but there was no doubt her mother had loved Pearl in her own way. Marjorie Harper had had a deeply possessive streak where her only child was concerned, and she’d projected all her warped ideas about the intimate side of marriage on to her daughter, along with the compulsive desire she had to control every aspect of her husband and her marriage. Pearl’s father had never spoken of his relationship with his wife, but within weeks of being wed Barney had read what was in the other man’s eyes and recognised it for what it was. How Stanley had stuck Marjorie for nigh on thirty years he didn’t know.

Barney slanted his eyes at the couple beside him. Pearl’s parents were sitting stiff and straight and without any part of them touching, but there was no doubt both were deeply distraught. But then again, if Pearl hadn’t died he’d be in the same boat as Stanley unless he had upped and skedaddled, and what man worth his salt did that?

By, in all his wildest imaginings of how things were going to work out he’d never thought it would be like this. And he wouldn’t have wished Pearl’s end on anyone. Not that he’d been allowed to be with her when she died. Pearl’s mother had been sleeping on a put-you-up at the side of her daughter’s bed ever since Pearl’s first collapse and had made sure Barney didn’t contaminate her daughter with his foul presence for more than a minute or two a day. If she could have surrounded the room in barbed wire and kept him out completely, she would have. They had taken Pearl to hospital, that last forty-eight hours, but Pearl had just got distressed when he had tried to sit near her and take her hand, and so the doctors had advised him to leave her to her mother. But he had gone in to see her after it was over and her father had taken her mother home, and he had hardly been able to recognise the young, pretty lass he’d fallen in love with so many moons ago. He’d felt a sense of desolation then, standing looking down at what once had been a living, breathing human being, and memories from the past - from their courting days - had come flooding in. But those days hadn’t been real; he knew that now. They had been an illusion.