Читать книгу The Complete Helen Forrester 4-Book Memoir: Twopence to Cross the Mersey, Liverpool Miss, By the Waters of Liverpool, Lime Street at Two - Helen Forrester - Страница 24

When I arrived home, Alan and Fiona were sitting on the bottom step of the imposing flight of steps which led up to the front door of Mrs Foster’s house. The evening was drawing on and the lamplighter was going on his rounds, pulling on the gas lights with his long rod as he paused, wobbling on his bicycle, at each lamp-post.

Alan was talking cheerfully to Fiona, who looked white and woebegone, her blue eyes wide and her china-doll features crumpled with fear.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked in some alarm, as I stopped the Chariot beside them.

Alan peered up at me through his tousled mop of yellow hair.

‘Fiona’s scared, and I’m telling her that there is nothing to be scared about,’ he said stoutly.

Trying not to show that I was frightened, I lifted Avril out of the Chariot with elaborate casualness and clucked encouragingly at Edward, who smiled at me angelically.

I sat down beside Alan.

‘What is the matter?’

Fiona answered through trembling lips.

‘Mrs Foster is shouting at Mother, and Mother is shouting at Father – and – and it’s an awful noise.

‘And I want to go home to Nanny!’ And she began to cry.

‘Be quiet!’ I snapped at her, and she was immediately reduced to cowed silence.

I turned to Alan.

‘Has Mr Ferris complained?’

Alan looked puzzled.

‘Mr Ferris? You mean about the noise we make?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh no.’ Alan chuckled suddenly and began to play an imaginary piano with gusto. ‘He makes too much noise himself. He just shouts at us because it makes him feel better.’ He tossed back his hair, exactly as Mr Ferris did, and finished his piano piece with a mighty boom on the bottom notes, ‘Boom-tiddly-boom – boo-om – boom!’

I wished that I had Alan’s cool common sense. In one sentence he had calmed my fears. But not Fiona’s apparently. Tears were running down her cheeks like raindrops.

‘What has happened, then?’

Alan sobered.

‘Daddy didn’t pay the rent. He spent the money on cigarettes, and Mrs Foster is as cross as two sticks. And Mother is crossest of all, because she helped to smoke the cigarettes without thinking of where they came from. And – well, you know Mother.’

I did know Mother. Even in her most halcyon days, her temper had been something to avoid at all costs. Now, sick, bewildered, hungry and despairing, her bouts of temper bordered on insanity. She was terrifying in her rages, more terrifying in her subsequent withdrawn silences.

I licked my lips and voiced my dread in a whisper, so as not to frighten Avril, who was sitting on the pavement playing with two matchsticks and a piece of orange-peel. Alan and Fiona bent their heads close to mine.

‘Do you think she’ll turn us out into the street – Mrs Foster, I mean?’

‘No idea,’ replied Alan phlegmatically. ‘Fiona and I just opened the door when we came back from school, and understood what the trouble was inside a minute. So we just left them to it – and came down here.’

‘Where are Brian and Tony?’

Alan sighed. ‘They bounced right into the room. Now they’ll be expected to take sides – and Brian will have nightmares – and probably be sick after tea.’

I nodded silent agreement. Poor Brian, sensitive to every nuance of every word spoken to him, would be reduced to incoherence by such an episode.

‘Have we got bread for tea?’ asked Fiona.

‘A little,’ I said.

‘Shall we ever have butter again?’

‘Of course,’ said Alan.

Avril toddled up to us.

‘I like jam as well as butter,’ she announced. ‘I want jam for tea.’

I suppressed an irrational desire to slap Avril, and we sat quietly watching seamen crowding into the hall of a house opposite to ours. In this house lived an assortment of middle-aged women, who were a great mystery to me. They were much better dressed than their neighbours, though they never seemed to go out to work. And they had lots of visitors – all men.

I watched the rolling gait of the men lounging up the steps. Many of them were already drunk. They shouted raucously to each other and laughed at remarks of which I did not get the import.

One of the single ladies who lived on the same floor as Mrs Foster, came down our steps and paused by us. She looked across the road and then regarded us uneasily.

‘Dawn’t yer think ye’d better go in, luv?’ she asked.

I looked up at her dully. She seemed magnificent to me with her veiled, flowered hat and flashing diamanté earrings. Her silver evening shoes and rayon stockings were close to me, however, and she did not smell very nice.

Uneasily, I turned my head away.

‘We can’t,’ I said.

‘Daddy and Mummy are cross,’ announced Avril, rising from the pavement and dusting down her little backside.

The lady bit her scarlet lower lip, as she considered this, and then said in confidential tones to me, ‘Eee, luv, ah think you had better get inside. Over there is going to be ruddy noisy – and rough to the likes o’ you. There’s four ships in.’

Though none of us knew what she meant, we rose reluctantly and Alan helped me pull the Chariot up the steps.

I appreciated that she had tried to be kind to us, and I thanked her, as she started to walk with swaying hips to the bus stop at the corner.

‘That’s all right, luv,’ she said cheerfully, and she hitched her mangy fox fur up round her chin and called to Avril, ‘Now, run along, luv.’

‘She’s pretty kind, isn’t she?’ I remarked to Alan, as we jointly heaved the Chariot up the stairs to the top of the house, from whence the sounds of battle still proceeded.

‘Yes,’ said Alan. But he did not sound convinced, though he added, ‘She gave me a sweet the other day.’

Just as we were about to tackle the last flight of stairs, we heard Mrs Foster’s heavy tread coming down. We cringed together on the landing as, without a word, she passed us, her black georgette draperies floating around her. Behind her she left a mixed odour of cats and birds.

Dead silence greeted us as we entered our room. My parents occupied the two kitchen chairs which the room boasted. Their mouths were clamped shut, and only my mother’s fast breathing told of the earlier strife. Brian was biting his nails feverishly, as he stood watching them. Tony was calmly playing with a pebble on the table, pretending it was a train: he muttered ‘chuff-chuff-chuff’ to himself as he ran it into a station. He looked up as we entered, his large intelligent eyes sad with a sadness unnatural in one so young.

‘Hello, Helen,’ he said, his voice sounding loud in the prevailing quietness. ‘What about some tea – it’s late.’

I did not know what to do about my parents, so I ignored them and answered him.

‘Yes, dear. Just let me unload.’

From around Edward’s feet in the pram, I exhumed a mass of small pieces of rubbish, which I had gleaned during my walk, and laid them in the hearth. There were empty match-boxes, cigarette cartons – which did not usually burn very well – bits of stick, twigs and paper of every description, and a whole tattered copy of the Liverpool Echo.

I raked through the cold ashes in the grate and salvaged a few cinders. Would I have enough fuel to boil some water, I wondered anxiously.

Alan kindly volunteered to run down to the bathroom and fetch a pan of water, and Fiona, without being asked, took Edward on her knee. She gasped as his wet napkin damped her gym slip and bare legs, but she did not complain. And all the time my parents sat in silence, almost prostrated by their quarrels.

It was nearly dark by the time the water was persuaded to boil and the tea was made. I cut a dry, white loaf into eight pieces of roughly equal size, and gave each of my parents a piece of it with a cup of the smoky tea, which had, of course, no milk or sugar in it. I gave a little tea to each child in whatever receptacles I could muster, with a piece of bread.

‘Can I dip?’ asked Tony. ‘The crust is too hard to bite.’

I looked at my mother, who ignored the question and stared moodily into her teacup.

My lather picked up his cup, and said suddenly, ‘You may.’

Thankfully, Tony and Brian plunged their bread into their tea.

‘The bread is so stale it’s second-hand,’ remarked Tony.

Brian giggled and snorted helplessly into his jam-jar of tea. ‘I’ve got a second-hand teacup to match,’ he gurgled, a note of hysteria in his voice.

‘I want some jam,’ shouted Avril.

‘Be quiet, Avril,’ said Fiona, who had given a little of her bread to Edward to suck on. ‘You know there is no jam.’

‘Not even any second-hand jam?’ the younger girl demanded with mock indignation.

My father began to laugh, at first a small wry chuckle in his throat and, then, gaining momentum, one of his old hearty laughs. I joined in, and soon the whole family was laughing hysterically, the noise pealing along the cobwebbed ceiling and down the stairs to the floor below, where the other tenants, hearing us, must have believed us to be mad.

Only Mother, wrapped in pain, fatigue and semi-starvation, sat silently staring at her cup of tea, her piece of bread in her hand.