Hope at Holly Cottage (3 page)

It wasn’t.

‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me?’

Anna glanced up at her father’s roar from the top of the stairs. He was on the landing, dragging her mother’s head up by the hair as she tried to escape from him.

‘I didn’t want to upset you—’

‘Upset me!’ Her father’s cry exploded like a crack of thunder. ‘Don’t you think I have a right to know that you’ve lost another one of our children?’

‘But—’

‘I thought your curse were going on a long time, and now you tell me it’s ’cause it were a miscarriage, and I didn’t even know you were pregnant! How could you? Or was it because it weren’t mine and you’d got rid of it?’

‘Vince, no!’ Freda Millington’s voice was a horrified shriek. ‘How could you think—?’

Anna had been cowering on the bottom step, stunned
with horror. But at the sounds of her parents grappling at the top of the stairs, well, she wasn’t going to just stand by and—

‘Stop it!’ she yelled, and went to fling herself up the staircase.

She didn’t see quite what happened next. She heard another blow find its target and then a series of rapid bumps as her mother tumbled down the steps, knocking Anna off her feet. The wallpaper, the banisters, turned cartwheels before her eyes and the pair of them landed with a dull thud in a tangled heap at the bottom.

For a moment, Anna couldn’t move. But the sound of her father clumping down the stairs made her claw her way through the fog and painfully she lifted her head. A dark silhouette was grabbing her father’s coat and cap from the hallstand, and an instant later, the house shook as the front door crashed shut.

And then silence.

Anna dropped her head back on the floor, waiting for the grey dizziness to pass. A whimper fluttered from her lungs and slowly, very slowly, she began to drag herself upwards. Her mother was lying across her legs, pinning them down, and somehow she managed to twist round and pull herself out from underneath.

‘Mum?’

Anna’s own head was still spinning. It would take a few moments before either of them would be able to pick herself up. But her mum still hadn’t moved, and Anna shook her gently. Several minutes ticked by, and as the muzziness cleared and her mother still hadn’t stirred, a kernel of panic began to uncurl deep inside.

Anna shifted into a sitting position and shook her mother
again. No response. Pulse racing, pounding in her ears. Trembling. A tiny, strangled sound in her throat.

‘Mu … um?’

She leant over, and realised how her mother’s neck was lying at an unnatural angle. And then she looked into her eyes – that were staring unseeing at the wall.

How long did she sit there, the blood draining down her limbs? Light-headed. Her hand had shot out to her mother’s jaw. She knew she wouldn’t find a pulse. But she had hoped.

Her own pulse drummed at her temples. Her stomach contracted. Rigid. Oh, dear God.

At long last, her body started to move. She hadn’t told it to. It just did. Unfolding itself from its uncomfortable position on the cold linoleum. The lino that her mum polished twice a week. Religiously. Without fail.

She was standing. Her mother crumpled at her feet. What should she do? Her brain wouldn’t answer. Instinct took over. And as she stumbled across the darkened, silent street, the cold made her shiver.

She knocked on the familiar door. Fred Shallaford opened it. Singlet and pyjama bottoms. Perplexed at the late visitor.

‘Anna?’

She opened her mouth to speak, but the only sounds that came out were mumbled gibberish. So she snapped her jaw shut and stared up at Fred’s craggy face.

‘What’s up, little maid?’ he frowned. ‘Yere, you’d best come in.’

Fred stood back, scratching his balding head, and Anna groped her way past him and into the kitchen. Mabel was sitting at the table in an old dressing gown, hair still in curlers – Anna wondered vaguely if they had been there all day – and sure enough, puffing on a cigarette. Ethel was chatting away, and in the course of ten seconds, Anna caught the name of Bertie at least twice.

Then Mabel looked up, the welcoming smile sliding from her face, and Ethel’s eyes widened as she stared at her friend.

‘Anna! You’m as white as a sheet. What’s ’appened? Come on, sit yoursel’ down.’

Ethel was on her feet, guiding Anna to the seat she had just vacated. Anna obeyed. Meekly. Dissolving onto the hard, wooden chair with its chipped, scarlet paint.

‘Drink this.’

Fred’s swarthy hand with its oil-stained fingernails slapped a small glass in front of her, and through the veil of her shock, Anna was ready to do anything she was told. She took a sip and the amber spirit scorched the back of her throat. She spluttered, pushing the glass away.

‘Knock it back, maid.’

The trust Anna held in this kind family overtook her numbed brain and she dutifully swallowed the liquid in one gulp. Almost at once, she began to feel its warmth seeping into her body. She felt oddly weak, but soothed and comforted. Safe.

‘Now tell us what’s up,’ Fred prompted gently.

‘It’s … Mum,’ Anna managed to stutter, for her teeth began to chatter as soon as she tried to speak. ‘She’s … fallen down the stairs. And I … I think she’s dead.’

‘What!’

There were audible gasps around the table and for once, Mabel’s cigarette fell from her lips. She hastily retrieved it between yellow-stained fingers, stubbing it out on the ashtray only half smoked.

‘You’m sure?’ The horrified question catapulted from her mouth in a stream of grey smoke.

Anna nodded, and waited to see what would happen next as her own brain didn’t seem capable of deciding anything for itself. It was Fred who came to her rescue.

‘Give us your key, maid,’ he said, ‘or is the door open?’

Had she shut the door? Anna couldn’t remember. But as she felt in her pocket, the key was there. Silently she placed it on the table, and with a dark glance at his wife, Fred picked it up.

‘Where’s your dad?’ he asked grimly.

Her father? Oh, God. A barb of terror speared somewhere beneath her ribs.

‘I-I don’t know,’ she stammered truthfully. ‘Out somewhere. At the pub.’

‘Hmm.’ Fred pursed his lips. ‘It’s closing time. I’d best be there when ’e gets back. Ah, that sounds like Davy coming in. I’ll take ’en with us.’

He went out into the hallway and Anna heard him talking with his son. It was a relief to know there would be two of them if her dad came back. Davy was only seventeen, a year younger than Ethel, but he was as tall and broad-shouldered
as his father and did a bit of boxing in his spare time.

‘You’m shivering.’ Mabel’s unusually lowered voice drew Anna back to the Shallaford’s warm kitchen. ‘Us was just going to bed, but I reckons us could all do with a nice cup o’ tea.’

It was all a bit of a blur from then on. Ethel placed an arm around her shoulders, ‘loving her up’, as she put it. The tea Mabel placed in front of her was strong enough to stand a spoon in with only a dribble of milk and heaps of sugar. Anna tried to sip at it but her stomach rebelled. And her lips could feel the dirty film on the rim of the cup.

Five minutes later, Davy was back, breathless and seemingly enjoying the crisis – until his mum clipped him round the ear. But it didn’t stop him reporting how he’d run to the telephone box on the corner of the next street and dialled 999. An ambulance was on its way, but his dad was sure … sure that, well …

So … that was it, was it? Anna sat. Staring at nothing. Feeling nothing. Some time later, a plain-clothes policeman appeared. An inspector of some sort. Had she seen her mother fall? Yes, she had. She had just got in, and her mum had come out of the bedroom and onto the landing to greet her, and then the next second she was tumbling head over heels down the stairs. Where was her father? Out at the pub. Which one? She didn’t know.

‘Leave the little maid alone, cas’n you?’ Mabel pouted her lips in accusation.

‘Sorry, madam. It’s only routine, but I have to ask. Seems to be pretty straightforward, mind. They’ll be taking the, er …’

Anna noted his light cough. Did he think she was an idiot? They’d be taking the body away, he was about to say, wasn’t he? And then she saw Mabel’s forehead crease.

‘Does you want to go with your mum in the ambulance?’ she said quietly.

Anna met her compassionate gaze. What was the point? She imagined the hospital. Cold, sterile corridors, still as death. Echoing footsteps.

She shook her head. ‘D-Dad?’ she croaked.

‘My constable will wait for him with Mr Shallaford. Perhaps you could stay here until your father gets back, if that’s all right?’

‘Course it is, the poor lamb. Is that all now? The cheel’s in shock, cas’n you see?’

Anna noticed him raise an eyebrow, but he turned and left the room, although she heard him mumble something about the possibility of further questions later.

It wasn’t until she was tucked up in Ethel’s bed in the room she shared with Primrose that it dawned on Anna what she had done. She had given the impression that her father hadn’t been there, hadn’t she? Somewhere deep inside, some defence mechanism had unaccountably taken over. In effect, she had lied. To everyone. Her mum had fallen down the stairs, she had said. Well, it was true, but she hadn’t explained
why
. That her parents had been having a vicious row on the landing and her dad had become violent. He hadn’t deliberately pushed her mum down the stairs, she was sure of that. In the struggle, her mum had lost her balance. But what if … ?

She sat bolt upright in bed. Fred hadn’t returned yet. What was going on at her own house across the street? Had
her father come home yet? Was he being questioned by the police? Oh, God.

But then, there was nothing to arouse suspicion, was there? The bruises around her mum’s throat from the recent throttling her dad had given her had faded. And her dad would arrive home from wherever he had gone to have the tragic news broken to him that his wife had fallen down the stairs and broken her neck. Anna was convinced he hadn’t realised what had happened when he had stormed out, and God alone knew what his reaction would be when he was told.

The image of her mum lying there, so still, so twisted, seared into Anna’s brain again. What the hell did anything else matter? Her dear, frail, faithful mum was dead. Killed by her devotion to the man her husband had once been.

Thinking, thinking, a million thoughts were turning somersaults in Anna’s head. There was something she couldn’t identify trying to push its way into her mind. Some feeling she knew instinctively her mind was trying to blank out.

‘Ethel?’ she whispered into the darkness. ‘Ethel, are you awake?’

But she knew she wasn’t. She could hear her friend’s deep, steady breathing from the other bed where Ethel had squeezed in next to her little sister. Anna’s eyes opened, staring at nothing. A narrow column of moonlight peeped in between the skimpy curtains, and her eyes gradually adjusted to the gloom. Familiar objects. The battered chest of drawers. The box of Ethel’s toys which had now been passed down to Primrose. The rag rug where Anna and Ethel had played together as children. All so reassuring. Comforting.

Too comforting. Allowing tears to well up inside her at last. She tried to hold them back, but they rose up in a deluge and began to stream down her cheeks in a torrent of big, fat pearls. She turned her face into the pillow, weeping until she had no more tears to shed. And some time in the small hours, when she still had not heard Fred return, she drifted into a restless, exhausted sleep.

‘I always said your father was no good for our Freda.’ Iris Catchpole folded her arms across her chest and hitched up her bosom. ‘Married beneath her, and now look. Didn’t look after her properly so she gets that weak that she faints at the top of the stairs. I could see it coming.’

Anna had been huddled on the settee in the little sitting room at the front of the house, staring at the glowing coals in the grate. The funeral had been a pathetically small affair with just a handful of neighbours coming to show their respects. Only Ethel and her parents had come back to the house – and Freda’s sister, Iris, and her husband, Clarence. Anna had watched her father pick up the empty coal scuttle, presumably to refill it from the bunker out in the backyard, and the moment he was out of earshot, Aunt Iris had delivered her damning condemnation.

‘Iris, dear, I don’t think—’ Uncle Clarence tried to mutter ineffectually, but was at once silenced by Mabel’s indignant riposte.

‘Saw it coming? ’Ow could you when you ’adn’t bin to visit your poor sister in years? Us was friends, Freda an’ me, an’ she told us what a proper cow you was, an’ never lifted a finger when Vince were injured. Could’ve bin left a cabbage, an’ what would
you
’ave cared, eh?’

Anna blinked as Aunt Iris rose to her full four foot ten, her face suffused to a violent puce. ‘Who on earth do you think you are? No better than a fishwife, and you’re trying to tell me—’

But Mabel was standing firm, hands planted determinedly on her hips, and Fred stood up, towering protectively over his wife. Anna had been observing them, locked in her own fathomless grief, and not a word had sunk into her brain. And yet some small part of her must have been listening. Anger foamed up inside her, snapping the fragile hold she had maintained on her broken emotions.

‘Oh, shut up, all of you! Mum’s dead and all you can do is argue!’

She sprang to her feet, glaring at them all in turn, and saw Aunt Iris’s round, pink face puff up even further. It almost made her want to laugh.

‘Well, I’m not going to stand here and be insulted,’ her aunt was announcing. ‘Come along, Clarence, we’re going. We’d best leave the girl to her
dear friends
,’ she added, casting a haughty sneer at Fred and Mabel. ‘But I still blame that Vince for my dear Freda’s death.’

She snatched up her coat and marched the two steps to the sitting-room door which miraculously opened from the other side and she collided with Vince who was coming in with the refilled coal scuttle. Anna saw her shrink back for a second before instantly lifting her head in defiance.

‘Hurry up, Clarence, we’re leaving.’

She swept past Vince out into the hallway and let herself out of the front door. Uncle Clarence gave an apologetic glance around the room, mumbled to her dad what Anna
thought was, ‘Sorry, old chap,’ and shambled after his wife. Anna almost felt sorry for
him
.

But everything was suddenly forgotten as her eyes caught the expression on her dad’s face. A look like thunder darkened his features, accentuating the deep dent in his forehead. Anna’s heart flipped over. She needed to grieve, to let the emptiness inside her fill up with tears and wash away the pain, but instead every nerve in her body was stretched with tension. Her father had been like a closed book ever since he had returned on that terrible night to find that, when he had stormed out, his wife had not been lying stunned at the bottom of the stairs as he had thought, but dead. He had hardly uttered a word since. Was he bereft, imprisoned in sadness, or racked with guilt? Anna had no way of knowing, and the strain of it was destroying her.

‘What you all looking at?’ Vince barked now.

Without the habitual cigarette for support, Mabel seemed momentarily flustered, but it only took her a matter of seconds to gather herself together. ‘I were just wondering ’ow dear Freda ’ad a sister like that,’ she declared.

‘Sister? More like one of those, what were they, gorgon creatures you learnt about at school, Anna? Medusa, wasn’t it, the one with snakes for hair?’

Anna nodded in reply. She could just see the head of Medusa, chopped off by the Greek hero Perseus, with her aunt’s face emblazoned upon it. She felt a hysterical laugh bubbling up from inside. Almost. Her father’s grim expression smothered it, and her strung-out nerves tightened further. What now? Her dad wasn’t an educated man, but he was intelligent and strong. He’d had to be, brought up in a
children’s home with no known family and then left to make his own way in the world. Her mum had been his life, and Anna was sure that, in his own strange way, he must feel as torn as she did. If only …

‘Well, good riddance, I says,’ Mabel pronounced. ‘But us must leave you good people. An’ we’m really sorry about Freda. Real lady, she were. An’ if there’s ort us can do, you’ve only to shout. Bain’t that right, Fred?’

The big man’s head jiggled up and down. ‘Thanks for the tea. An’ Mabel’s right. If us can do ort … Well, you knows where us lives. You coming, Eth, or you staying with Anna for a bit?’

‘I’ll just ’elp Anna wash up. Pass us the tray, Annie, an’ us can stack the dirties on it. Lovely sponge, by the way. Bake it yoursel’, did you?’