Mill Town Girl Read online

  She speeded her pace, overtaking him. ‘Hurry up, Alan. It’s vital.’

  They were outside in the tree-lined avenue. The great wrought-iron gates were behind them. Alan leaned against the high stone wall. Now she could say what she liked. ‘What is it?’ he asked, and he smiled at her and tried to make amends for being short-tempered. ‘Tell me.’

  Rose’s face, normally so pale, was bright pink and her eyes were troubled. ‘Can you get a baby from kissing?’

  The question was asked in such a rush that Alan was not sure he’d heard her properly. ‘What?’ he said.

  She began to cry. Her wide mouth was being pulled downwards at the corners and soft, snorting noises came from the back of her throat. ‘Can you get a baby? From kissing? Of course you can’t.’ He couldn’t bear to see her crying. He never could. When she was little he used to feel at a complete loss if she cried; he never knew what he was supposed to do about it. He fished in the pocket of his blazer for a handkerchief. ‘Here,’ he said, offering it into her hands. ‘Stop crying. Tell me all about it.’

  She fell into step beside him, alternately sniffing and blowing her nose. ‘A boy kissed me,’ she said. ‘He held me down and kissed me.’

  ‘Who did?’ Alan felt a quick surge of anger towards the boy.

  ‘I don’t know his name,’ she said and the awful crying threatened to come over her again.

  ‘Well, how?’ Alan demanded.

  ‘You know the way I come home from school – we can cut through the park or walk down Victoria Road?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She stopped walking and turned to face him. ‘These boys jumped out – they pulled Norah and me into the bushes in the park and . . .’ The sobs were starting again but she blew her nose loudly. ‘The one who’d caught me put his hands behind my head so I couldn’t move away, and . . .’

  ‘He kissed you?’ Alan finished the sentence for her.

  ‘He stuck his great fat tongue into my mouth, Alan.’

  Her voice was getting louder but it didn’t matter, the road was empty. She was looking at him with such indignation that all at once he had an urge to kiss her himself.

  ‘His spit went in my mouth, Alan,’ she wailed, ‘and – and . . . I swallowed it!’

  He could hardly believe his own ears. ‘Surely you remember what I told you?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but are you sure? How do you know? Who told you?’

  This was ridiculous. How could she doubt it? It was plain common knowledge that had never been hidden from him. And he’d told her all she’d wanted to know, ages ago. ‘I’ve known as long as I can remember,’ he said. ‘And I told you two years ago.’

  ‘I know! But you told me all about sheep and cows.’ She was looking at him with pleading eyes. ‘And we had a lesson at school. We had to have signed permission to go to it,’ she said, trying to hold back her tears.

  ‘Well? You know, then. What did they tell you?’

  ‘They told us all about rabbits. How they grow inside the doe.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘And the bucks make the seeds.’ Now she was staring at the path, not looking at his face.

  ‘So what makes you think you can have a baby from kissing, Rose?’

  He could not understand it. ‘You’re not a fool.’

  She looked up after a moment’s hesitation. ‘The biology teacher didn’t tell us all of it. Nor did you. She never told us how the seeds got inside the female. We knew she didn’t want to tell us. I thought it was only me who didn’t “twig it” but Norah doesn’t know either.’

  ‘But we’re just the same as the animals,’ he said, with a sigh of bewilderment. ‘You’ve seen animals. Dogs and cats.’

  She pressed her mouth tight and gave a starchy look. ‘We are not animals,’ she said. ‘We are “set above the animals” according to the nuns, Alan.’

  Her obstinacy made him speak sharply. ‘I’ve helped Nat Cooper for years. There’s only one way you can get a baby.’

  ‘Doing It?’ she asked. ‘Like the animals do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She began to walk slowly and he kept pace beside her again. It was a few seconds before she spoke. It was as if she were thinking it over. ‘Oh,’ she said at last. She cast a shy, sidelong look his way. ‘I never made the connection, somehow.’ She turned her gaze on to her feet as she walked beside him. ‘I suppose it’s obvious. Sometimes I just don’t see the most obvious things,’ she went on in a mournful voice. ‘I don’t think in straight lines. I look for complications.’

  ‘Don’t you believe me?’ he asked earnestly.

  ‘That means that Mum and Dad have Done It. At least three times.’

  He smiled. ‘That’s what people get married for,’ he assured her.

  ‘I thought it was a sin.’

  ‘It is, if you’re not married.’ He was trying not to laugh now.

  ‘It isn’t afterwards?’

  ‘No. People get married so they can do it.’

  ‘They must both want to Do It, then,’ she said at last. ‘I can’t imagine why.’

  She began to smile again then all at once went serious and looked at him accusingly. ‘You thought girls had periods, didn’t you?’ She stopped walking. ‘Every month?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I had one, two months ago,’ she said, ‘and no more after that.’ She scuffed the toe of her sandal in the gravel.

  ‘And you thought you were going to have a baby?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Look at me, Rose.’ He took hold of her hand and turned her to face him. Her dark blue eyes were misted under wet black lashes. ‘You can’t get babies any other way. Not from kissing. Not even from French kissing.’

  A smile of mischief was breaking through so he went on, holding her hand tight. ‘Perhaps girls’ periods aren’t regular right at the start. And Rose?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He didn’t want other boys to kiss her. It had given him a quick, jealous shock when she’d told of the boys who had waylaid her. ‘Don’t let anyone kiss you.’

  ‘I hated it, anyway,’ she said emphatically. ‘I hope nobody ever tries it again.’ She walked ahead of him, carefully placing one foot on the grass verge, one on the footpath as she went.

  She was beautiful, slender and graceful. He wondered how it was he’d missed seeing it in all the years he’d known her. ‘You won’t say that in a few years’ time,’ he said. ‘The captain of our first eleven called you a knockout.’

  She stood stock-still and looked at him with incredulous eyes. ‘The silly ass!’ she said.

  One minute she was his friend, the next she was like the older girls. Alan knew that their childhood friendship was over. He’d have to start treating her like a young woman. ‘Come round after supper?’

  ‘All right. But I’ll have to be home for nine.’

  ‘Aunt Carrie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She had forgotten her fears now. Now she was going to tell him all her news. It would come tumbling out; all she’d done at school and at home since she’d last seen him. ‘Wait until I tell you what happened yesterday,’ she said.

  When she went round to Alan’s house later, Rose told him what she’d heard the evening before. She had been weeding her patch of garden ready for the pansies and asters she wanted to plant out. It was eight o’clock and there was hardly any daylight left but, bent double under the window of the living room, she worked fast, loosening and pulling long runners of couch grass that had spread from the lawn into the small, brick-bordered square of soil.

  Aunt Carrie was inside and Rose heard her say in a startled voice. ‘He wants what?’

  Rose could hear her aunt clearly through the closed window. She kept her head down. Aunt Carrie was easily upset and she did not intend to witness another of her aunt’s outbursts. In a minute she’d slide along under the window, let herself in at the front door and go up to her room.

  ‘He’s coming here.’ Mum sounded determined.<
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  Rose stopped weeding and listened. They must be talking about Dad’s brother. He had sent them a telegram from Dublin to say that his wife had died. Uncle Patrick and his wife had never lived together, Dad told her. The marriage had been a mistake from the start but when he heard that she had died he had come over from Canada to Dublin to see the relatives.

  ‘He can’t.’ Aunt Carrie’s voice was high. It had a note of fear in it. Rose knew every inflection of her aunt’s voice.

  ‘You can’t stop him, Carrie.’ Her mother’s tone had taken on the placating note she used to her sister. ‘His wife’s dead. He’ll be here for a week, until the boat sails from Liverpool. He wants to see her.’

  Rose kept as still as she could. Which one did Patrick want to see?

  ‘When is he coming?’ Rose heard Aunt Carrie get to her feet. Chairs were scraping along the floor. All at once she was afraid that she’d be seen and she crouched lower and pushed her back against the wall of the house.

  ‘The week after next.’

  ‘You two can entertain him, with Mary and Vivienne,’ she heard her aunt say. ‘I’ll take Rose to Southport.’

  Rose and Aunt Carrie were going to catch the early train to Southport in the morning and Rose, for the first time, was to sleep overnight at her aunt’s. She had not minded being the one to miss the visit of Dad’s brother. She was sure that he hadn’t specially wanted to see her. And this was to be her very first holiday.

  Aunt Carrie’s sitting room in the Temperance Hotel was cluttered. Their house in Wells Road had Dad’s drawings in the hall, Mum’s flower pastels and some pictures from abroad in the front room and, in the living room, a holy picture and a print of The Boyhood of Raleigh. Aunt Carrie’s room was like a gypsy’s den. There was barely an inch of wall that wasn’t covered in pictures; there was hardly space on top of the furniture for more than the china figures, porcelain vases and silverware they already held. Most of it, Aunt Carrie told her, had come from her old home; the rest she’d collected.

  ‘You have no room to move about in, Aunt Carrie,’ Rose said. ‘I’d get rid of most of it, if it were mine.’

  ‘No you wouldn’t. Not if you knew what it’s worth,’ Aunt Carrie said. ‘They’re worth more than the house, Rose.’ She looked hard at Rose and lowered her voice, as if afraid that the neighbours might hear her. ‘And when they come to you, mind you don’t let them go.’

  Rose couldn’t imagine that she and her sisters would want to hang and display the things Aunt Carrie thought of as works of art. Aunt Carrie was funny; she turned her back on love and friendship yet gloated over her little knick-knacks.

  ‘All right,’ she answered, trying to ignore the look in Aunt Carrie’s eyes. ‘I’ll see they’re taken care of.’

  For as long as she could remember she’d had this sense that Aunt Carrie was only a few yards away, watching her; she always felt that every decision regarding herself had to be approved by Aunt Carrie. When she was younger she used to look first at Aunt Carrie after she’d spoken, knowing from a movement of the lips or eyebrows whether or not her aunt was pleased. Mum faded into the shadows and let Aunt Carrie take charge. If the moment ever came when she’d have to stand up to Aunt Carrie, she’d do it. But today, with Aunt Carrie in such a changed mood, she’d better not spoil things.

  ‘Where’s the case?’ she asked. ‘I’ve brought all my stuff round in a parcel. I haven’t a bag of my own.’

  ‘I’ll buy you one, in Southport,’ Aunt Carrie replied. ‘Put your things in my case.’

  It felt odd, packing her things in the heavy leather case of Aunt Carrie’s. She folded her clothes: slips of patterned artificial silk, skirts and blouses she’d made on the treadle sewing machine from material bought in the market, her navy-blue bathing costume with a red stripe that went from her left shoulder to her right thigh, and the new sandals and dress Aunt Carrie had bought for her.

  She wanted to giggle when she saw Aunt Carrie’s deep pink corsets with the long strings wrapped around them. Aunt Carrie didn’t need corsets; she was slim and straight and it made Rose want to laugh, thinking of her holding her breath and pulling the laces tight. Next to the corsets, even funnier, were Aunt Carrie’s silk vests and pink silk bloomers with elasticated knees.

  But Aunt Carrie was taking all the nice-smelling stuff off her dressing table and Rose knew her aunt would let her share them. She loved Aunt Carrie’s scented things. The Floris Gardenia was her favourite. Like her aunt she was repulsed by certain odours that others scarcely seemed to notice. She held her breath when she passed Potts’s shop on coffee-roasting days and she dared not enter Carters where sacks of smelly meal for rabbits stood around the floor.

  She and Aunt Carrie shared the same tastes in food too. Neither of them could eat meat that hadn’t been prepared at home and sometimes they would both crave the same things on the same day. ‘I need to eat something dark green,’ they’d said almost in unison, one spring morning.

  Rose could not help out at church rummages where old clothes were brought for sale, for, even though they had been washed, there was a sour smell to them that turned her stomach. But her aunt was packing the Elizabeth Arden face cream, the Pond’s cold cream and two new pieces of Cuticura soap. It was baby-soap really. Aunt Carrie said it was the only stuff that didn’t irritate her sensitive skin.

  ‘Where will we stay?’ Rose asked. ‘Is it near the sea?’

  ‘A woman at chapel told me about it. I’ve only been to Southport once, on a Wakes Monday trip. We’ll get a taxi from the station.’

  Aunt Carrie had one tiresome fault in the eyes of Rose and her sisters; she talked about money too much. The Kennedys never spoke about money. Aunt Carrie spoke about little else but the need for thrift, though she was given, now and again, to wild extravagances. Rose wondered at her aunt for going to the expense of a taxi. It’d cost her a shilling, at least.

  Rose was as excited as a child. She lay wakeful all night in one of Aunt Carrie’s attic bedrooms, trying to imagine what Southport would be like. She knew that there was a pleasure ground, a long pier with a tramway and parks and gardens galore. Her friends at school had told her that there were glass canopies in front of the shops and that the shops were full of beautiful clothes, even better than those in Lewis’s of Manchester. Southport had seawater baths and an outdoor bathing lake, a boating lake, a miniature railway and wide streets with even bigger houses than those of Lincoln Drive. She wanted to see everything.

  Whilst Rose was lying in her bed imagining the delights of the seaside holiday, Carrie, in her bedroom, could not sleep for the palpitations that made her heart throb in her throat.

  Patrick Kennedy was on his way to Macclesfield and she could not face him in front of Jane and Danny – and Rose. Ever since her first letter had flitted its tentative way over the seas they had corresponded regularly and, to Carrie’s unease, secretly. For he never mentioned in his letters to Jane and Danny that he wrote to her. He should have done. She hadn’t asked him to make a secret of it, though he’d have known she could not justify writing to him after all this time.

  If he had been a gentleman, she reasoned, he would have said in his letters to Jane and Danny something like, ‘I have written to Carrie and hope she replies’. Then, for her part, she could have announced that she had heard from him. But, no, he’d made it all undercover, so that now it was like a conspiracy from which she could not withdraw; so that now she never dared say anything when Jane and Danny spoke about him, in case she tripped herself up.

  But the most unsettling thing was that before their correspondence started she had managed to subdue her passions. Since, with every letter, the old feelings were evoked and her treacherous mind seemed bent on remembering their lovemaking. She had to remind herself, every time she held a letter in her hand, that he had deceived her and led her from the paths of righteousness. She tried to order her pulses not to race as she opened his letters.

  And he had not acknowledged that he was the fath
er of Rose. She remembered his reply to her first letter. ‘The photographs are very good and much appreciated. Rose is a lovely child with the Kennedy look about the eyes and mouth, don’t you think?’

  She’d been disappointed. She’d wanted proof; proof to show to Danny if ever he said those wicked things again. In the letter he’d gone on to talk about himself and John McGregor and their great adventures in the Canadian Arctic where they’d spent a winter fur trapping with the Cree Indians. He’d enclosed a photograph of himself skinning a fox, just to disgust her she thought.

  She wrote back, asking why he had not put it in writing that he was Rose’s father, and his answer, which had taken three months to reach her, said, ‘Stop this, Carrie. Rose is Jane and Danny’s daughter. All that which is the child’s natural love for her parents belongs to them. I have to think of her as theirs. Don’t you see that?’ Then he’d gone on to write about how the fur trade wasn’t for him and that he and John McGregor were going back to Quebec. But it was a kind of admission.

  Since then his letters had been shorter versions of the ones he sent to Jane and Danny and perhaps to the McGregors, since he was Alan McGregor’s godfather. And always, in his letters to her, there was a paragraph right at the end where he came out with something double-edged with meaning. It was always there. It was as if he couldn’t end his letters on the simple, friendly note he started with. And every time a letter came, every time she saw that handwriting, her heart started beating faster, just as it used to do when he came near.

  Tonight she couldn’t sleep for thinking about him. Sometimes, it came over her again, like a recurrent illness. They said that malaria was like that, striking out of the blue, making you feverish. There were times like tonight when, if she didn’t control her imagination, she would be back, lying, naked, in his arms. She didn’t want to think about him. What was done was over and done. He had been her downfall but she had risen above it. She was a respected, respectable woman now. A single woman could never aspire to the heights of importance that a married one could; not in a town like Macclesfield. But she had her place here. She told herself she should be content. And she knew that she was not.