The Urchin's Song (47 page)

‘Like I said, you don’t have to come with me,’ Josie repeated quietly.

‘Don’t be silly, of course I’m coming with you.’

‘Then could you go and talk to Mrs Wilde quickly because I have no desire to be here when Oliver comes.’

‘Do you think he’ll come after you?’

‘I don’t know. Yes, yes I think he will, but Lady Conway said--’

‘What?’ Gertie paused on her way to the door.

‘The doctor diagnosed concussion and told him he had to rest.’

‘Oh, Josie.’

Gertie left the room without saying any more, and it came to Josie that although Lady Conway and her sister were worlds apart in every way, their voices could have been identical in tone when expressing their opinion on the matter of her husband’s injuries.

 

Not so Lily. When the hired carriage deposited Josie and Gertie and two trunks of their immediate belongings on the doorstep of the house at the back of the Caledonian Market, Lily was 100 per cent solid in her support.

Josie talked to her old friend in the very comfortable privacy of Lily’s sitting room after the housekeeper had brought them through a tray of tea, and initially Lily just stared at her, open-mouthed and lost for words for once. And then she said, ‘And he went arse over head and nearly brained himself? By, lass, I’d give me eye-teeth to have been there. The times I’ve wanted to see some blighter who’d been messing me about get his just deserts, but I never did. No, I never did. No guts to confront ’em, you see. All mouth and hair as me old mam used to say.’

‘Not you, Lily.’

‘Oh aye, me all right. There’s them that say an’ them that do, and you’re a doer sure enough. So, what
are
you going to do?’

‘Divorce him.’

‘Divorce him?’
It was Gertie who spoke although Lily’s mouth had dropped open even further. ‘He won’t let you, not Oliver. Oh Josie, you can’t, you can’t. Just think of the repercussions for a minute. He’s your manager as well as your husband and he’s so influential, you know he is. Lily, talk some sense into her.’ Gertie flung her hands wide in an unconsciously dramatic appeal to the other woman. ‘Tell her she’ll be cutting her own throat career-wise. She
needs
Oliver.’

‘I think Oliver needs Josie a darn sight more than she needs him if you want my honest opinion,’ Lily said quietly, ignoring the look on Gertie’s face which told her Gertie did not want her honest opinion. ‘And I don’t mean just in a business sense either,’ she continued, turning to Josie. ‘He loves you, lass, everyone knows that. Oh, I agree he’s not what you’d call ideal husband material but he was never going to be. That’s Oliver. And I have to say he’s arrogant and self-opinionated to a fault, and this latest means he probably thought he could have his cake and eat it, but with all that - he does love you.’

‘Then love is not enough, not that kind of love anyway. ’

‘That’s for you to decide, lass, one way or the other.’

‘I have decided.’ Josie’s head, which had been bowed, raised itself and Lily saw the lovely brown eyes were dry and burning with dark emotion. ‘I could forgive his gambling and drinking and all the other excesses, but not this. This is different.’ And as Gertie went to speak Josie made a sharp movement with her hand as she said, ‘I mean it, Gertie, and if you can’t understand then you can’t, but that’s how I feel. This is different.’

‘If it had been with anyone else but Stella Stratton, how would you have felt then?’ Gertie asked flatly.

‘Exactly the same.’ And then Josie corrected herself, saying, ‘Well, perhaps not exactly the same, but near enough to do what I am doing now.’

She stared defiantly at her sister, who nodded abruptly. ‘Nothing more to be said then, is there?’

‘No, Gertie, there isn’t.’

Fortunately Josie only had another two weeks of her current contract left at the Empire; Oliver had been in the process of negotiating an extension for another six weeks but as yet, nothing had been signed. This meant she could leave London with impunity, and once Bernard understood she wasn’t abandoning the Empire in favour of another London theatre - Drury Lane, the Gaiety and others were after her, as he knew full well - but was returning up north for a spell, he was more amenable to letting her have the Monday night off when Josie explained she had urgent personal business to attend to. He wanted to keep her sweet for when she returned to London anyway. She was a crowd puller, was Josie Burns, and unlike some of the performers he had to deal with she didn’t have an odd day off here and there due to the amber liquid. So he agreed she would be ‘sick’ come Monday night, and Monday morning saw Josie on the train to Sunderland - alone.

Gertie did not offer to accompany her and Josie did not suggest it; in truth she was feeling more than slightly aggrieved at Gertie’s attitude since she had returned from Berkshire, and for the first time in their lives a rift had opened between the sisters. Gertie had barely said two words since they had arrived at Lily’s, and when her younger sister had gone with her to see Ada and Dora, and her two older sisters had mirrored Lily’s reaction to the turn of events, Gertie had become even more sulky.

The newspapers were still full of the story of the tragic death of twenty-three people when one of the new electric trains in Liverpool crashed, and that, along with the Glamorgan pit disaster which took one hundred and twenty-four miners, and reports of a further outbreak of typhus in the East End of London made for depressing reading. Josie gave up the attempt after a while and slept most of the journey away, in between visiting the dining car for a very nice lunch which she only picked at. She was very tired; she and Gertie were sleeping on two shake-downs in Lily’s sitting room after Josie had flatly refused to let anyone give up their beds for Gertie and herself, and these were not conducive to a good night’s sleep. Not that she would have slept much anyway; her mind was constantly dissecting the scene with Oliver and Stella whether she was awake or asleep.

The train chugged into Sunderland Central Station on a blazing hot afternoon, and when Josie stepped on to the platform and looked up at the arched roof, particles of dust floating idly in the sunlight and the sound of warm northern voices all around her, she felt like a small lass again for a moment or two.

On leaving the station she checked into the Grand Hotel which was an imposing building of five storeys and ideally situated, being just a minute’s walk from the railway station, and after depositing her small portmanteau in her room she left immediately for Northumberland Place. She found it strange that nothing had changed since she’d been gone. She’d married Oliver, travelled a little, risen almost to the top of her profession and entered a privileged life which held no resemblance to the one she’d known before her marriage, and yet everything here was just the same. The same old trams creaking and grinding along, the same horses and carts piled with everything from fruit and potatoes and fresh meat to sacks of coal, the same shop awnings and, inevitably, the same raggedy, barefoot urchins darting about, the latter increasing in numbers the nearer Josie got to Northumberland Place and the East End. Likewise the smell of ripe fish from the quays fronting Sunderland Harbour. But it was home, it was home. She breathed in deeply of the warm air, thick with the odour of industrial smoke and fumes from the factories and workshops, roperies, ironworks, shipyards, limekilns and other industries clustered along the Wear, which, flavoured by the smell of fish, smelt like no other place on earth to Josie.

What would all the folk scurrying about their daily business think if they knew she was actually relishing the smelly air? she asked herself with a touch of dark humour. But it didn’t matter what people thought. It wouldn’t have to, certainly in the immediate future. Folk would be scandalised when she divorced Oliver. She didn’t know anyone, apart from the odd one or two in the profession, who had ever had a divorce. But then, when she thought about it, and she had been thinking about it a lot since Saturday morning, that was because women put up with their men doing exactly as they pleased most of the time. And that seemed to be the case whether the woman in question was a working-class lass in the north or a Lady something-or-other in London.

There’d been a piece in one of the London papers in May when the Suffrage Bill had failed, which had reported one of the MPs saying that ‘men and women differed in mental equipment with women having little sense of proportion’, and he’d gone on to say that giving women the vote would not be safe. And that summed up very aptly how most men saw things, Josie told herself darkly, as she turned off High Street East towards Northumberland Place. Well, her sense of proportion was working quite nicely, thank you very much, and from what she’d seen of life thus far, the mental equipment needed to juggle bringing up a family, paying the rent, putting food on the table and often working from home which was most women’s lot, was far in excess of the average man’s.

There were a group of barefoot bairns sitting on the dusty pavement playing ‘Kitty Cat’ when Josie turned into Northumberland Place, and she stood for a moment watching them hit the pointed piece of wood with numbers scratched on it. Dirty and poor as they looked, they all seemed relatively well fed, and certainly a couple of them keeping the scores knew their numbers. They were some of the lucky ones, Josie thought soberly as she walked on. She couldn’t ever remember playing in the street when she was a bairn. Her da had seen to it that they were either out begging or working most of the time, and she’d had to fight him every inch of the way to get any schooling for herself and the others.

Monday being washing day, there were lines of dangling clothes and linen strung up in the back lanes and between lamp-posts in the side streets, and now the faint smell of bleach hung in the still air.

Josie took a long breath and then squared her shoulders before she knocked on the door in Northumberland Place. She knew the dropsy which had plagued Vera for years had meant her friend giving up work some months before, and she was hoping at this time of the day that Prudence would be at work. Barney’s sister would have to know about the state of her marriage eventually, of course, but just at the moment she only wanted to share the news with Vera and Horace. Once she had spoken to Vera she intended to approach a couple of the theatres in the town with a view to appearing here when she’d left London. Maybe the Avenue first; it was currently Sunderland’s most respected theatre and seated fifteen hundred people, and then perhaps the Palace or the Royal. She could do a couple of weeks at each, by which time she should be in a position to see the future a little more clearly.

Vera’s squeal of delight on opening the door spread a little balm on Josie’s sore heart, and as she was pulled into the kitchen amid a deluge of questions that had her laughing in the end, she thought again, Nothing has changed, nothing.

‘Ee, lass, I can’t believe it!’ Vera beamed at her, shaking her head in wonderment. ‘Here was I, thinkin’ the only thing in front of me was the ironin’, an’ then you knock on me door. Talk about a sight for sore eyes. An’ don’t you look bonny an’ all; the tongues’ll be waggin’ in this street an’ no mistake. Everyone’s tickled pink that a lass from these parts has made good in the halls. Come on, lass, get your things off an’ have a sup.’

‘Oh, Vera.’ Josie took her friend’s hands as she said, ‘It’s so good to be back.’

‘Good to be back? You gone doolally, lass? With your lovely house an’ the goin’ on you’ve got?’ This was said without a trace of resentment, Vera’s face still split in a grin that went from ear to ear. ‘Now sit yourself down an’ take the weight off. I’ve got a nice bit of ham an’ egg pie that’s waitin’ to get on the other side of somebody, an’ a sly cake made not an hour since.’

Vera pushed her down on a kitchen chair before she turned to the range and busied herself with the kettle, and it was in that moment, as Josie looked down at her friend’s grossly swollen legs and feet, that she thought, No, things are not the same. Vera was getting older and it showed.

The kettle settled on the fire, Vera turned round, pulling out a chair from under the table and sitting down heavily before she said, ‘Well, if this isn’t a treat. You up for a day or two, hinny? An’ where’s that man of yours, an’ Gertie?’

Josie had been worried she would burst into tears as soon as she caught sight of this woman who meant more to her than her own mother ever had, but strangely, now she was here, she didn’t feel like crying. In fact, if she had had to analyse her feelings, she would have admitted to exhausted relief being paramount. ‘I’ve got something to tell you but it’s just for your ears and Horace’s at the moment, Vera. It’s like this . . .’

Vera had always been a good listener and she didn’t interrupt once, but as Josie finished her story the older woman breathed out noisily, before saying, ‘The blasted fool. I’ve met some stupid so-an’-sos in my time but he takes the biscuit, he does straight. An’ I thought more of him, lass, I did really, him bein’ a gentleman an’ all.’