Читать книгу The Mothers of Quality Street - Penny Thorpe - Страница 7

It was late, and the illuminated windows of Reenie’s boarding house acted as a beacon to her young man, her cheerfully drunken father, and his long-suffering, peculiarly ugly horse.

‘Reenie!’ Her father called in a whisper loud enough to wake half the street. ‘Reenie! Ruffian’s thrown a shoe, Reenie.’ Mr Calder hiccupped loudly and then sneezed. He was a little man and the force of both actions seemed enough to knock him off balance, but his nag, who waited with a martyr’s expression, righted him with a light, well-timed head-butt. Ruffian was the master of the light, well-timed head-butt. ‘Reenie! Can you come and take Ruffian?’

There was a rattling of locks, bolts, and chains before the front door of Mrs Garner’s boarding house opened onto the balmy June night, heavy with the scent of lime tree blossom. It was Mrs Garner herself who opened the door; bleary-eyed, and tightly wrapped in as many layers of coats and dressing gowns as she thought appropriate for a respectable Yorkshire widow of advancing years when opening her front door at midnight. ‘Peter McKenzie, whatever are you doing out of doors without a coat after dark? You’ll catch your death of cold.’ Mrs Garner knew Peter, of course, but she was used to seeing him call for Reenie in his smartest clothes, with his hair neatly combed. This sorry specimen was not in keeping with the Peter McKenzie she knew.

Peter looked at his sleeves in confusion, the knowledge that he had no coat only just dawning on him. ‘I don’t feel very well.’ His lost expression made him look much younger than his nineteen years.

‘You my Reenie’s landlady?’ Mr Calder was taking his cloth cap off his balding head and smiling politely in the general direction of the stone-fronted boarding house while leaning slowly away from it.

‘Yes, but she’s not home yet, Mr Calder. She’s working a night shift down at the factory.’ Jane Garner tried to keep her voice to a genuine whisper in consideration of the neighbours, who thought her far too lax with her boarders as it was.

‘Oh.’ Reenie’s father’s expression of disappointment was almost comical ‘But I’ve got an ’orse, see.’ He jerked up the hand which was holding Ruffian’s makeshift bridle, in the manner of a marionette whose string had been pulled suddenly. Then he let it drop with a glum sigh.

Mrs Garner was a respectable woman, but she was no stranger to tipsiness. She could see that Mr Calder and young Peter wouldn’t get much further that night and Mrs Garner had never in her life hardened her heart. ‘You give that to me, Mr Calder.’ She shuffled down the steps from her front door to the pavement in her flapping slippers, gently prised the rope from his hand and tied it around the railing above the cellar steps. ‘Ruffian can bide here while you wait in the parlour.’

‘No, I got a friend, see?’ Mr Calder was telling his daughter’s landlady as she pushed him awkwardly up the steps. ‘I got a friend I know’ll stand us a drink. Good old boy.’ Mrs Garner didn’t know if he was talking to the horse or about the friend. ‘I just wanted Reenie to mind the ’orse.’

‘Very wise, Mr Calder, very wise. Up the stairs now; you too, Peter.’

When Reenie arrived home an hour later she was confused to see a coat she recognized draped neatly over a hedge at the top of the hill, her father’s horse in the street and the parlour lights lit down below the level of the street. Something was afoot.

‘Don’t wake them.’ Mrs Garner intercepted Reenie as she came through the front door. ‘You’ll never guess who’s sleeping on the parlour table.’

‘Is it Peter and me dad?’

‘How did you know?’ Mrs Garner was helping Reenie out of her coat and hanging it up along with the coat Reenie had rescued from the hedge as she passed.

‘Well, I’ve just found Peter’s ulster in the bushes, which I thought might indicate he’d been passin’ this way, and as for me dad, I can’t help but feel the presence of his massive great workhorse in the middle of the street was a bit of a giveaway.’

‘They said he’d thrown a shoe.’ Mrs Garner was all concern and Reenie couldn’t help but feel she was very lucky to have such a caring landlady.

‘Thrown a strop more like – Ruffian kicks his front shoes off if he doesn’t fancy a job; he thinks he’s too good for farm life.’ Rennie saw her father sitting at a chair in her landlady’s kitchen parlour with his mouth hanging open and his cheek pressed against the tabletop. ‘Come on, you.’ She patted him on the shoulder. ‘Time to go home to Mother. You can’t sleep like that, you’ll do your neck in.’

Reenie’s father snorted awake for a moment, fixed his eyes on his daughter, squinted, rubbed his face, and then smiled. ‘They made my daughter a manager.’ He wobbled upright and proudly jabbed his finger into his own chest. ‘My daughter. Junior Manager.’

‘Yes, Dad, I’m well aware of it. Now it’s time to go home.’ Reenie could see why girls whose fathers were in this state every night tired of it, but as it was only once or twice a year in her own father’s case she couldn’t help but find it comical. ‘What have you done to my young man?’ She waved an arm at Peter, who was snoring gently with his head on his folded arms and his straw-coloured, floppy hair a disorderly mop. ‘I told you to bring him back in one piece.’

Mr Calder beamed with pride and told his daughter in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘He’s a cracking lad, he is. Cracking lad.’ Then sighed contentedly back to sleep.

‘Did I do the right thing?’ Reenie’s landlady asked with concern. ‘Bringing them in to the parlour, I mean. I didn’t like to let your Peter catch cold without a coat. And Mr Calder was ever so wobbly.’

‘No, you did right. They’re in no fit state to go home.’

At this, Peter’s shoulders moved and he lifted his head very, very slowly. ‘Please don’t make me drink again. Reenie, I don’t want to drink again.’ He looked sad and lost and put his head back on the cool, comfortingly stable kitchen tabletop.

‘You were meant to be a good influence on m’dad! “I’ll go with him”, you said. “He’ll only have a couple this year,” you said. Now look at the pair of you. And what am I meant to do with the ’orse?’ Reenie’s questions were in vain as Peter had already begun to snore and Mrs Garner’s cat was looking daggers at him from her place by the stove for making a noise while her kittens were trying to sleep.

‘I didn’t know your Peter drank,’ Mrs Garner said.

‘He doesn’t, really; I think that’s the trouble. Me dad asked if he could take him to the Ale Tasters’ summer do. After their big do last October I thought it couldn’t be any worse.’ Reenie looked at her father and her young man, put her hands on her hips and huffed. ‘There’s me dad encouraging me to board in town so’s I’m not riding back to the farm late after a night shift at the factory; there’s him sayin’, “Oh no, Reenie, you’re a manager now, lass. We can’t have you run ragged helpin’ on the farm when you’ve got a chance at Mackintosh’s. You stay in town, don’t mind us.” And I come home from a night shift, ready to crawl into me bed, and what do I find? Merry hell.’

‘Should I fetch them a blanket each, do you think?’ Mrs Garner’s maternal instincts were strong. ‘And maybe a little cushion for their heads?’

Reenie ruminated. ‘All right, let’s throw a blanket on each of them because I don’t want the nuisance of nursing them through pneumonia, but I draw the line at a cushion.’

‘What about a pitcher of water and some glasses? They might wake up thirsty and be glad of them.’ Mrs Garner shuffled busily round her kitchen-parlour in her flapping slippers, opening cupboards and humming cheerily as she looked for the tin of Carr’s water biscuits, ‘And just one or two little dry crackers.’

Reenie rolled her eyes ‘You’re soft on them, that’s what you are.’ But she smiled because she liked knowing that her father and her young man were in good hands. ‘I’ll walk the ’orse round to the factory stables and bed him down there for the night. If I’m not back in an hour you know I’ve fallen asleep on an ’ay bale.’ Reenie checked for her latchkey in her pocket and then crept up the stairs to her own room to leave Peter’s ulster on a hanger out of the way. Reenie almost missed the figure who was waiting in the open doorway at the other end of the landing. The young woman had evidently been woken by the noise downstairs and was now leaning against the door frame in her nightgown with her arms folded.

It was the factory colleague who boarded in the next room to Reenie, and she did not like to be disturbed. ‘Are we quite finished for the night?’ It was a sarcastically nonchalant question.

‘Yes, Diana. Sorry. M’dad and Peter were just …’ Reenie’s voice trailed off; she was not known for holding back if there was an opportunity to give someone a bit of cheek, but Diana was not someone to whom anyone would dare give lip. ‘I’ll just go and take away the ’orse.’

As Diana turned back into her own room Reenie caught a glimpse of her orderly quarters. Diana was something of a mystery to Reenie; she was ten years older but never had gentleman callers, which always puzzled Reenie because Diana at, twenty-six, was of an age to be getting serious, and she was the most beautiful girl that Reenie had ever seen. It was a mystery, too, that they were not better friends because though Diana might be older than Reenie, they had been thrown together in innumerable ways. From the moment of Reenie’s arrival at the toffee factory nine months previously, they had worked together on the line; they had collaborated to help save the Norcliffe sisters from dismissal; they had been tried together at the same unjust disciplinary hearing that had nearly lost them their jobs – and they had fought to save the factory after they had watched it burn almost to the ground.

Now they were living under the same roof, but still not really friends. Reenie couldn’t understand it; she seemed to make friends with everyone she met, but Diana was as distant as ever. Reenie might have put it down to Diana’s forced separation from her family after the factory fire – the separation which had led her to seek lodgings – but Diana had been withdrawn even before those changes.

Diana was quiet, but never shy – she simply appeared to have little interest in anything except the gramophone records she had inherited from her father, or spending time with her young half-sister Gracie, who she visited at the home of Gracie’s adoptive family every Sunday. Diana sometimes brought Gracie round to their boarding house for tea after they had been on an outing together and Reenie was hoping the little girl would be back again soon because when she was with Diana it was the only time she ever saw her fellow boarder smile.