The Unforgiving Shore Page 9

  He stayed overnight and the next morning she called him to her. She took his hand and placed it on her nightgown over her breast. He could feel a horrible lump although he scarcely dared move his fingers.

  “I’m going to die soon, son.”

  “Not if you go to Darwin for treatment, Mum.”

  She looked at him, as though she hadn’t heard, only the faintest glint in her eyes now. “Paul, that toper, Lucas, was telling the truth when he told you John Marchmont was your father.”

  The image of Lucas’s hairy navel came to Paul, as it always did when he thought of the meeting with the lawyer and Ellen’s contemptuous rejection of him.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” The words rattled in his dry throat.

  His mother’s absolute denial at the time of Ted’s funeral had cast him into limbo. Arthur Lucas had been repulsive and unconvincing. Hindsight told him that he had rejected what Lucas said too hastily. He had virtually ignored the notes which Ted Travis was supposed to have approved; he was so upset that he hadn’t read them with any attention. He was shocked by Lucas’s revelation. He was like a man concussed. He wasn’t in any condition to measure anything Lucas had said. He ignored and immediately destroyed subsequent letters from Lucas, exhorting him to make a paternity claim against Marchmont. He pulled a blind down in his mind, not on what he had been told, but on whether it was true and, if so, what to do about it. All these reactions stopped him taking a step toward Marchmont to resolve the issue. And he was stopped by an inner pride which said, If Marchmont is my father and he doesn’t want me, I don’t want him. Now, there was no doubt about the truth of Lucas’s allegation.

  The limbo had lasted for years. Paul often thought about his paternity, but it was like a secret in a tomb on a distant mountain, beyond an impassable desert.

  Paul’s everyday life may have been ordinary but it was challenging and absorbing. He had luckily become rich and it was easy to let the conjuring of ‘what might have been’ fade and concentrate on business and his friends. And of course, as the years passed, Marchmont’s status as his father became nominal and practically unimportant.

  “Why didn’t I tell you?” Ellen said, “Because we didn’t need Marchmont. You don’t need him. Look at you. Dick Mather told me you were one of the smartest businessmen in the territory.”

  But Paul felt angry and cheated; not cheated so much of a culture or lifestyle, he was at ease with his own, but cheated of knowing. He almost wished the doubts had remained.

  “I never needed or wanted any money from Marchmont, Mother. It isn’t about money.”

  “I didn’t want him to have you, Paul. He’d have taken you away from me if he’d known. He’s clever. He’d have gone on treating me like a servant, keeping me below stairs, not good enough to meet his friends. He’d have taken you away to foreign schools and I’d never have seen you. He would have said I owed it to you…”

  He thought for a moment that perhaps she did owe it to him.

  She looked at the ceiling, her face distorted with pain. “I married Ted to give you a father and a good father he was while he lived… but he deceived us. I wasn’t going to let Marchmont have his son, his only son, not after the way he treated me. None of his whores could produce a son. He didn’t deserve you…”

  Paul felt her folly and selfishness choking him. She loved him in her way, but she had treated him like an item of her property and used him to spite Marchmont.

  “Why didn’t you leave Mirabilly years ago, forget it all, instead of living with this suffering?” Paul asked, his voice hoarse with incredulity.

  “Yes,” she whispered, “the pain I’ve suffered makes the pain I have now easy to bear. I didn’t leave here, because I belong here.”

  “No, Mother. You have relatives and surely friends in England.”

  “A horrible place full of rain-drenched people. I was a queen here, a very long time ago, before you were born. What do I want with a cottage in Townsville or those miseries in King’s Lynn?”

  He thought her reasoning was deluded but he didn’t challenge her.

  Paul sat with Ellen during the day. Dr Rogers visited and said there was nothing more he could do. He asked to speak to Paul privately. They crouched in the tiny lounge room of the cabin, trying to avoid being overheard by her.

  “She’s going to die shortly anyway, son,” Dr Rogers said. “She’s in a very advanced state. She must have known she had something wrong a year ago and decided to ignore it. Flying her out now for surgery would be a huge trauma and I doubt if it would win a few more months. Let her have her way.”

  Later that day Ellen began to talk to Paul with frankness about her past, things she had never mentioned before. The talking relieved her and even at times brought a smile of memory to her ravaged face.

  “I travelled across the world with John. Oh, what a time we had!” She paused and began to paint disordered pictures with her words, which Paul was able to fit into a story, the story he thought that a mother might have sketched for her son, scene by scene, over their years together.

  “John was a lovely and loving man, but I wasn’t good enough for him. He deserted me and he lost his only son. I made him pay that price…”

  PART 2

  THE SQUARE MILE

  11

  Ellen Travis’s marriage to Peter Burnham ended for practical purposes at about 10pm on a Friday night in spring 1952, not with death or divorce, but simply a blaze of understanding, then ashes.

  She was nineteen and they had been married under two years. She worked as a waitress in the Deluxe Milk Bar in Swaffam Place, King’s Lynn. She was easing up after a day on her feet, wiping the tables, rubbing spots of mustard and tomato sauce off the shiny menus and thinking of going home to Aunt Hilda’s terraced house in Wharf Street where she and Peter had a room. Then Hilda and a police officer arrived in a police car.

  Hilda marched into the Deluxe, her thick heels clacking on the tiles, the policeman swaying behind her. She bellowed at Ellen from a distance and the customers all looked up from their plates; their interest guaranteed by Hilda’s plaintive tone. “Your Peter’s been hurt! He’s been in a smash. He’s in the General at Castle Rising!”

  “What happened?” Ellen choked, but neither Hilda or the officer knew more.

  “Come on, luv, I’ll run you over there right now,” the officer said.

  “You go, Elly,” the manager said.

  She pushed her damp, red hands into her coat sleeves and squeezed into the back seat of the police car, visions of carnage swirling in the dark of ignorance. Hilda whimpered.

  At the hospital enquiry desk she inhaled the smell of disinfectant and floor polish and waited while a clerk, his face immobile like papier-mâché, pecked at a typewriter keyboard. Her husband was dying and the clerk went on with his business. “Please?” she said, but it made no difference. After an age, she learned that Peter was in the intensive care unit. She ran along the shiny rubber corridors, Hilda limping behind, taking wrong turnings, misreading signs, begging surprised nurses and orderlies to give her directions and hardly waiting to hear them. When she found the ward, the iron-faced sister in charge started to question her and Hilda about who they were.

  “I’m Peter Burnham’s wife!” Ellen repeated, unable to restrain tears any longer.

  The sister softened. “He’s unconscious. You can’t see anything.” She led them to an alcove where a lone bed was connected to machines by tubes and wires.

  Ellen’s first thought was that Peter was lying in state in a church, his body enclosed in a white sarcophagus. Only a small part of his face round the closed eyes and nose was visible, the flesh angry, suggesting that everything hidden by the sheet was boiling and bloody. She couldn’t even tell that it really was Peter.

  She had a surge of empathy for the pain of a vigorous creature. Only that morning as Peter pulled on his work-shirt, she had watched the muscles on his back surging under the skin. She had hoped that they would soon draw close as lovers
. Now, his life was measured as a pulse on a chart.

  She looked round. Hilda snuffled. Fred Fussell, her uncle on her mother’s side, who lived next door, arrived in the frayed yellow cardigan he wore around the house.

  “Will he get better?” Ellen asked a doctor who was frowning at the dots on the chart.

  “Too early to say.”

  “Can you tell me please, what happened?”

  The doctor lifted a record card from the rack at the foot of the bed. She reached for the card. The doctor drew it away. “Spinal injuries. Car accident. One passenger treated and discharged.”

  “Who was discharged?”

  The doctor looked at her critically. “We have to confine ourselves to the medical side. You can get the information you want from the police. I might unintentionally mislead you.”

  “Look, I don’t know anything!” she pleaded; and then she could see from the way that the doctor was holding the card that there was only one other name on it beside Peter’s. The doctor saw her looking and turned the card away, but she had seen. The name burned on her retinas. The name was Caroline May Kenny.

  Her friend Carol in a car with Peter on a Friday night when he was working overtime at Lacey’s garage? It didn’t make sense. She clawed for the significance of it only for a fraction of a second. It did make sense.

  Peter’s mother arrived, a little fat woman with a knitted bonnet like a tea cosy, buttoned into a long brown overcoat. She threw her arms around Ellen and started to wail. Ellen could smell her waxy oldness and see the hairs on her chin close up. Peter’s Uncle Cedric came in, stomach bulging out of a stained shirt with a phlegmy pipe-smoker’s voice.

  “Come on!” the sister said, holding out her arms and herding them toward the door. “You can’t carry on like this in here. Mr Burnham can’t have visitors.”

  As Ellen rushed out ahead of the others and without goodbyes, she heard Peter’s Uncle Cedric mutter to Fred Fussell, “Young bugger always did drink too much!”

  *

  When Ellen descended the front steps of the hospital alone, a cab was waiting on the rank and she got in without hesitation; the first time she had hired a cab for herself in her life.

  “Orchard Street, near Barton Village,” she said decisively. She knew Carol Kenny’s address as well as she knew her own. Blakiston Row where Ellen’s family had lived was a block away. Alf Kenny, Carol’s father, used to work in the grain store with Ellen’s father. She had grown up with Carol; they went to school and to dances together; they were not only close friends but Ellen had confided some of the intimacy of Peter’s courtship to her.

  It was after 9pm when Ellen unlatched the gate and took the three steps that brought her to the front door of the Kenny house. The downstairs lights were on, the curtains open. Carol’s mother opened the door before Ellen could knock, drew her inside and put a comforting arm around her shoulders.

  “My girl doesn’t want to speak to you, Ellen, but she will. I’ll see to that.”

  Ellen faced Mrs Kenny on the lounge suite in the tiny parlour that was only used on Sundays. The light fell starkly from the lampshade in the centre of the ceiling. Mrs Kenny was grey with concern. She gripped her lumpy hands together in her lap.

  “Carol’s been messing round with your Peter and it’s time she owned up. I’m sick of it!”

  Ellen sat stiff-backed. Her mouth was dry. She had nothing to say and no tears; only an ache inside.

  “I’ll get Carol,” Mrs Kenny whispered, going out of the room.

  Ellen waited. After a time there was a shuffling and sniffing outside the door; then Carol burst into the room with a moan, a faded woollen housecoat around her. “I’ve got a dreadful headache…”

  Ellen noticed how the slovenly garment accentuated Carol’s curves. Ellen was silent. She had no accusations to make.

  Carol crumbled in the pause. “We hit it off, that’s all.” She tossed her permanently waved yellow curls impudently. “He started it, coming to the salon for a chat at lunchtimes. I didn’t ask him. I told him to get off, but he kept coming.”

  “So you decided to go to bed with him.” It wasn’t a question; only a dismal conclusion. She spoke softly.

  “It wasn’t like that, Elly. He’d come round in one of Lacey’s cars. Ask me to go for a ride. Well, I thought, on a nice day, what’s the harm?”

  “You know what the harm was.” Again, the low voice and a distant feeling.

  “We didn’t mean nothing, Elly.”

  “How long?” Ellen asked, surprised at her steady, lifeless voice.

  “About… I don’t know…” Carol had a friendly expression, sharing a naughty confidence with a friend.

  Ellen waited, emotions churning but cold outside.

  “All right,” Carol said. “A year I suppose, maybe longer.”

  “A year, maybe longer,” Ellen repeated. A year of working at the Deluxe, wiping tables. A year of powdering herself on Saturday nights to smell sweet in bed, and getting only beery breath and farts.

  “It was only a bit of fun, Elly. We didn’t mean nothing by it, I swear.”

  Every word hit the marriage like a swinging demolition ball. A year and she knew nothing. A year of deception. A year when she searched for little favours to try to show an irritable man who ignored her that she cared for him.

  Carol began to talk now and Ellen hardly listened. “I know he really loves you, Elly, but he used to say it was so awful living with Hilda and you couldn’t have any… you know… fun.” Carol gave a wicked little smile.

  Ellen saw the teasing, knowing flash in Carol’s eyes. She remembered how quickly after marriage the closeness with Peter faded, his hairy thighs coming down on her, the bed and floorboards moaning in protest. And Hilda’s big white ears, like moulded candle-wax, listening at the foot of the stairs.

  “I promise, Elly,” Carol said, confirming the elegance of the outline of her hair with her fingertips, “I won’t ever see Peter again.”

  Ellen exploded, a hysterical half-laugh at the absurdity. “It’s too late for that now!”

  She stalked out of the room, pushed past Mrs Kenny who was hovering just outside and went out of the front door. The harsh night air struck her. She slipped on the uneven paving stones and crumpled into the wet gutter.

  *

  Ellen was the last of Arthur Colbert’s four children and if she was the family beauty, there was a price to pay which she never anticipated.

  She was born in 1933 when the depression was biting into the area around Blakiston Row; it was near the wharves at King’s Lynn on the Great Ouse River. The family lived in one of the lines of damp, red brick terraced houses. Her father had been out of regular work for years. The family survived on the dole, or relief work when Arthur dug ditches and shovelled garbage. It was not until 1938 when war was in the air that Arthur was able to go back to his old job in a grain store on the river. But nothing much changed and the family continued to exist during the war on vegetables from their garden, bread, pork dripping and milk powder. Only the free issue tins of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company’s golden syrup stopped. Occasional treats, a rabbit, a chicken, a pheasant or a duck were obtained in ways which led the older generation to simper and be silent in front of the children. Hand-me-down clothing was all Ellen could remember in those early years. All the women in the extended family swapped garments and set about cutting and stitching to remake them; they passed them along the line of family wearers as the seasons’ needs dictated.

  The poverty of Blakiston Row didn’t impinge on Ellen at the time. The square mile around the tiny terraced house was full of cousins and uncles and aunts and grannies on both sides of the family. She felt she belonged, buttressed by family; there was always somebody to help, always something to laugh at, always a sense of safety and permanence. The Colberts and the Fussells, her mother’s name, had lived there for generations.

  Ellen’s brothers, Arthur junior and Reg, started to do odd jobs for money when they were old enough t
o lift a pail of water and left school as soon as they could. Her sister Ivy, the oldest, looked after the house and their mother, until their mother died of tuberculosis. Ellen was the only one who had free time while she was growing up. Her widowed Aunt Hilda taught her to play the piano a little and took an interest in her progress at the Ship Lane Secondary School. Her father always joked about Hilda being grand and said she was turning Ellen into a little lady. Ellen could feel the critical edge.

  Shortly before her mother died, when she was fourteen and about to start the new school year, she was trying on an old gym frock of Ivy’s and admiring herself in the mirror.

  “My, Ellen,” her mother said, touching her own breast, “you’re too big to be wasting your time chittering in class at school. You should be working my girl, earning a little, and putting it by.”

  “Why, Mum? I quite like school and I don’t need any money.”

  Her mother’s mouth tightened knowingly. “Because you’ll be married before you know it.”

  *

  Ellen left school when the year was out. Everybody was expecting her to leave. The feeling in the family was that school was a place that children attended to keep themselves occupied until they were old enough to go to work. Learning, the kind of learning you do at school, was something for the children of bosses who were going to be bosses themselves; it was just a waste of time and a headache bothering with it. That was the attitude in the Colbert home and throughout the square mile.

  Ellen got work in Mr Reywin’s grocery shop at the end of Blakiston Row, filling shelves at first and then serving customers when Reywin realised that she could count quickly in her head. She fought off his attempts to put his hand up her skirts when she was on the ladder stacking shelves and kept quiet about it. Her mother died and she had to keep the job.

  At sixteen she was allowed to go to the Saturday night dance at the Palais de Dance on Market Square, provided she was home by ten-thirty. By 1949, with World War II which she scarcely understood, over, there was a sense of excitement and anticipation. Despite the ruins of the war the world was going to be different, with new opportunities for everybody. But this was no more than an idea received from the second-hand radio in their parlour.