A Leaf in the Wind Read online

  Contents

  Also by Marie Joseph

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Copyright

  Also by Marie Joseph

  Emma Sparrow

  Maggie Craig

  Footsteps in the Park

  The Gemini Girls

  The Listening Silence

  Polly Pilgrim

  The Clogger’s Child

  Non-Fiction

  One Step at a Time

  A Leaf in the Wind

  Marie Joseph

  For

  Kathryn Louise Hampton

  1

  ‘I’M HALF AN hour late anyway, so there’s no point in moithering myself, Mr Waring. I might just as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.’

  Jenny Macartney laughed, and as she laughed Bob Waring was struck with the fanciful thought that if he put his hands towards her, they would be warmed in just the same way as if he held them out before a fire.

  That was the effect the tall smiling girl walking by his side had on most folks. Jenny Macartney was all youth and freshness, as bonny as a spring-lit day, with her dark brown curly hair, her red cheeks, and a mouth that always seemed set to smile.

  He knew also that they made an incongruous pair, or what would be called in that part of Lancashire a right pair, the thirty-one-year-old widower with his gingery brushed-back hair, and the seventeen-year-old shop girl.

  She turned to him suddenly. ‘It’s good of you to walk home with me, Mr Waring, but I’m not frightened, honest I’m not. I’ve got a spare hat pin ready in me pocket. A long one with a point on it as sharp as a dagger.’

  Jenny patted the pocket of her long brown coat, and he nodded, wishing he could think of something funny to say. They were there all right, the smart replies, the witty remarks, but he could never quite put them into words.

  ‘Aye, well, I’ll come just the same,’ he said, and fell into step beside her.

  They walked down the cobbled street away from the red-brick Sunday School building, past the terraced houses, already showing yellow lights behind their upstairs blinds. When mill workers had to be up at five, they were in bed by ten, sometimes even earlier than that.

  Bob Waring often watched this girl’s face from his seat in the choir stalls on Sunday mornings and evenings at the Chapel adjoining the Sunday School. It was what he called privately a thankful face, even when she was supposed to be praying, and the minister was preaching about the fires of hell. A hell that awaited most of his congregation, judging by the deeds he categorized as sins.

  Bob inclined his head gravely. ‘You make a gradely Mary Magdalene in the play,’ he told her as they turned the corner into Whalley Street. ‘I thought you were very –’, he searched for the right word, ‘very moving tonight when we did the last scene.’

  Jenny nodded, wishing with all her heart that this funny little man with his protruding eyes and bobbing Adam’s apple would stop insisting on seeing her home. She could have run all the way if she had been on her own, and more than that, she could have gone over and over in her mind the beautiful words she had to say. She could hear them like music in her ears as she tried to imagine how it must have been all those years ago. Nineteen hundred years ago, which wasn’t long if you said it quick.

  ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him. . . .’

  She was going to wear a red tablecloth draped round her before she was converted, then afterwards a white sheet coming up and hiding her hair. And she was going to cry if she could manage it, and she would manage it or bust. Really cry with tears running down her cheeks.

  She could work herself up into a mood of anguish and sorrow before it was her turn to go on. She could be practising right now if only this little man would leave her alone. If he would only stop staring at her with his face that reminded her of one of the pet rabbits in a cage in the shop where she worked. He was supposed to be Pontius Pilate in the play, but trying to be dignified only made him look ridiculous. No wonder the man taking the part of Jesus had looked at him with such scorn.

  Jenny bit her lip, aware that her thoughts verged on the blasphemous, knowing that often her thoughts were far too frivolous for such a sacred subject.

  To her, Jesus and God were real persons, and God was a loving father she felt she could call on at any time, even chivvying Him up a bit when things were going wrong.

  ‘Come on, then, God,’ she would say when her mother whined more than usual, or when her step-father went into one of his frequent rages. ‘Come on, God, let’s have a bit of peace round here,’ she would say.

  But as far as peace went, her step-father, Harry Howarth, did not seem to know the meaning of the word. It was as though he was angry with everybody, all the time, forever shouting and swearing and sweating, his big face puffed up with temper so that the veins stood out on his forehead like purple tramlines. He hadn’t even had a good word to say for the old Queen Victoria when she had died last year.

  ‘Right old misery she was,’ he’d said, shocking his wife into stunned silence.

  Jenny turned to smile at the earnest little man trotting beside her. ‘We’re nearly there now, and thank you for walking home with me. See you on Sunday at Chapel then. Ta-ra!’

  The door of the dingy terraced house, a house built at the time of the Industrial Revolution for the town’s mill workers, was on the latch, but Bob Waring waited at the corner of the street until he saw that she had opened it and gone inside.

  Jenny knew that he was standing there on the pavement, raising his billycock an inch or so above his head, managing somehow to bow from the waist at the same time. And the image he conjured up in her mind would have made her smother the laughter, if she had not heard her step-father’s voice booming out from the living-room.

  ‘Oh, flipping heck,’ she sighed. She was in for it again, and if she could have gone straight up to her bedroom she would have done so, but the stairs went straight up from the living-room, so there was no escape.

  Taking off her coat and snatching the tammy from her head, she laid them over the horse-hair sofa in the darkened and never used parlour. She smoothed down her unruly hair, tucked her blouse more firmly into her skirt-band, then parted the curtain dividing the two downstairs rooms. She would brave it out, she decided. This time she was not going to apologize. She had done nothing wrong, and there was nothing to apologize for. Nothing.

  ‘It’s turned proper cold outside,’ she said, in what she hoped was a light conversational tone. ‘It wasn’t too warm in the vestry neither. John the Baptist said his chilblains would give him what for when he got home in front of the fire.’

  Mollie Howarth stared at her daughter through eyes swollen with weeping, then weakly turned her head away and stared into the fire.

  Small-boned and fat, with flesh that seemed to lie in loose folds beneath her dress, she had married Harry Howarth five years ago, not long after her first husband Jack had died of consumption.

  Jack had been a good husband to her, always kind and thoughtful, and she had taken it for granted that her second marriage would be as tranquil. She stared at the dying embers of the fire until she felt her eyes ache with dryness, then as she heard Jenny’s voice, they filled and swam with ever ready tears.

  A persistent and habitual crier was Mollie Howarth, and always had been, even when she was reasonably happy. When her Jack had been alive he had always been ready with softly spoken words of comfort, his quiet voice soothing and placatory. Not a bit like this great hulk of a man who terrified her with his rages, reducing her to a quivering mass of jellied nerves and emotions.

  Harry Howarth was standing with his back to the fire, and she did not need to look at him to see that his flat mottled face was scarlet with uncontrollable rage. She knew that his fingers were on his wide leather belt, itching to remove it, and give this step-daughter of his a right good leathering.

  One of these days he would do just that, and then Jenny would go. Mollie knew that for a fact, and the tears flowed afresh at the thought. She raised a corner of her pinafore and wiped her eyes on it.

  ‘Oh, Jenny, love,’ she pleaded silently. ‘Why do you have to rile him so? Why can’t you come in at half-past nine like he tells you to? Is this extra half-hour worth all the bother it causes?’

  ‘What time do you call this, you young devil?’

  Harry’s head was back, his mouth wide as he stared at the girl standing straight and tall with the length of the table between them.

  ‘Five minutes past ten, Father,’ Jenny answered politely, so politely that the big man immediately construed her tone as insolence.

  He moved, and for a terrifying moment Mollie was sure he was going to hit out with his clenched fists. She risked a quick glance at her husband and saw how his face was suffused with hate. She could feel his anger, and tremulous and helpless, she bowed her head before it, and began to moan softly to herself.

  Jenny, with a tremendous effort, kept her voice low and her tone reasonable. ‘The rehearsal went on a
bit later than we thought it would, and if I had come away it would have spoilt the scene for the others.’

  She tried to smile, but all the shining happiness was wiped from her features, as if someone had taken a damp flannel to it. She held her head high as she told herself that she would never be afraid of this bully of a shouting man with the veins standing out on his forehead, and spittle glistening at the corners of his mouth. He was nothing but a big shouting wind-bag, and she would tell him so if it wasn’t for her mother cowering on her chair behind them. He could rant and rave and she could shut herself right off from him, just as if she had suddenly gone stone deaf, but it was her mother she worried about. Somehow Harry always managed to take it out on his wife.

  The beautiful words of the scene she had recently taken part in, flowed through her mind unbidden, and Jenny found she was comparing their serenity with the coarse language being hurled at her. She felt she hated her step-father so much she was sure her flesh crawled with the despising of him.

  He thumped on the table so that the teapot rattled its lid, and the two pint pots actually rose an inch into the air. ‘When I says half-past nine, I means half-past nine, not five-past bloody ten!’ he roared. ‘And take that look off your face, you cheeky little sod! While you’re living here you do as I say. D’you hear me?’

  There was for Jenny, a strange and unadmitted excitement in standing there watching this man disintegrate as he lost control. Over the years she had taught herself to keep quite still as she watched him go to pieces and saw his eyes bulge out of their sockets like chapel hat pegs. His thick-set body swelled as if he were actually going to explode.

  What might have struck an onlooker as insolence on Jenny’s part was in reality a carefully monitored fear. Not of what he might do to her, but a fear that she herself would lose a grip on her slipping control, and find herself shouting back at him.

  And that in itself was funny, because her fat sloppy little mother screamed back at him sometimes. So why couldn’t she?

  Maybe he would shut up quicker if she did, but her habit was to stand her ground, her expression non-committal, and her eyes weighing him up as if she found him wanting.

  Harry’s throat was swelling now, puffing like a bull frog’s, and as always, when he was more than usually angry, his Irish accent became more pronounced:

  ‘No decent girl walks the streets alone at this time o’night. I’d have come a-looking for you, that I would for two bloody pins!’

  Jenny blinked mildly without changing her expression. ‘I did not walk home on me own, Father. Mr Waring brought me home almost right to the door.’

  ‘Mr Waring?’ Harry’s contempt seemed to spatter the walls of the room, so that Jenny imagined the gas lamps dimmed in their brackets. ‘Who for the love of Mary and the angels is Mr bloody Waring when he’s at home?’

  Jenny sighed and shifted her weight from one foot to the other. If only it had been a Friday instead of a Thursday, then her step-father would have had a belly full of beer, and his thoughts would be blurred. Nasty, but blurred.

  As it was she guessed that with no money in his pockets he had been forced to stay in, giving him time to work himself up into a lather before she came in.

  She sighed. ‘Mr Waring is a good man. He sings tenor in the choir. His wife died two years ago having a baby, and he lives now with his sister and his father up Park Road. His father got his leg caught in a machine at the paper works, and it went worse and won’t heal, so he stops in bed all day. He’s an old man now . . .’

  She was gabbling and she knew it. She was trying to interest her step-father in something other than the fact that she was late in, but it was hopeless. The only thing that had registered with Harry was that Mr bloody Waring was a Methodist, and therefore to him, a non-practising Catholic, the scum of the earth.

  ‘Aye! One of them Methody buggers!’ he roared. ‘I know his sort. All mealy-mouthed and down on his knees of a Sunday, then getting a girl with her back up against a wall of a Monday. I know his sort!’

  ‘Harry!’ Mollie’s protest was a thin wail. The tears gushed from her pale eyes and ran in full flow down her flabby wobbling cheeks. ‘We ought to be glad that Mr Waring brought our Jenny home. We ought to be glad there’s some as are gentlemen.’

  She began to rock herself backwards and forwards in the chair, head down, chin folded over chin, swollen ankles hanging over the tops of her threadbare slippers. ‘They’re a nice family the Warings are. He’s got a white collar job young Mr Waring has . . .’

  At last Mollie had done what Jenny had failed to do. She had drawn her husband’s fire to herself, and his immediate reaction was to lumber over to her, place his hands on the chair arms to still its rocking. The next move was to bend down and leer into his wife’s petrified face.

  ‘Stop that bloody rocking, can’t you! And stop interfering too! So Mr bloody Waring’s a gentleman, is he? Like your precious Jack was, is he? And I’m not, am I? I’m good enough to pay the rent, but not good enough when it comes to a bloke what sings in the choir and wears a blasted stiff collar!’

  Quietly Jenny tiptoed to the foot of the stairs. She gave a last despairing glance at her mother cowering back in her chair, then ran swiftly up the flight of uncarpeted stairs.

  There was no point in staying to defend her mother. On more than one occasion she had done that, and only made things worse. In the end they had both finished up shouting at her, united for a brief moment. Married couples were like that, Jenny had decided.

  She shuddered. But if what she was hearing downstairs was what marriage was all about, then she wanted no part of it. Ever!

  Groping for the candlestick on the table at the side of the bed, she found the matches and lit the candle. Then she closed the door and started to undress, ignoring the hollow feeling at the pit of her stomach. Going straight from the cat-meat shop where she worked to the rehearsal had meant that all she had eaten since twelve o’clock was a bun, with the mug of tea brought to her by the proprietor’s wife at five.

  ‘But I’m not going downstairs again. Not for nothing!’ she told herself firmly.

  There was a swing mirror on the top of her dressing-table, and by sitting on the bed, there was just enough space for the drawers to be pulled out, whilst over in one corner a curtain wire stretched from the picture rail, forming a wardrobe of sorts. Jenny unbuttoned her navy blue serge skirt, let it drop to the floor, then picked it up and folded it carefully over the bed-end. Then taking off her blue knitted jumper, she held a fold of it between her finger and thumb and sniffed.

  ‘What a pong!’ she said aloud, and wrinkled her nose in disgust.

  In spite of the cotton overall she wore in the shop all day, the smell got through to her clothes. Huge slabs of horse-meat cut up and boiled in the copper in the backroom, then weighed out for the dog owners who came to buy it and carried it away in newspapers. Why they didn’t call it a dog-meat shop Jenny did not know.

  She peeled off her black stockings and sighed at the chilblains discolouring the backs of her long slim legs. Even in summer they were pink, and when the weather turned cold they changed to purple.

  ‘Who wouldn’t get chilblains, dear?’ the minister’s wife at the chapel had remarked. ‘Standing like you do on your legs in that cold shop for twelve hours a day? Surely there could have been something better?’

  ‘Me mother didn’t want me to go in the mill,’ Jenny had told her, and the minister’s wife had rolled her eyes upwards and said no more.

  In spite of the wooden wedges Jenny had used to fix the frames of the sash window, the wind was rattling them as if they would fall out any minute. Jenny pulled her long flannel nightgown down over her head, and with frozen fingers tried to fasten the row of tiny buttons down the front of the yoke.

  ‘Right, God,’ she said out loud. ‘I’m going to say me prayers in bed tonight, that’s if You can hear me with all that row going on downstairs.’

  The hardest part was pretending she didn’t care. Most of the time it was true, because there was always something you could laugh at if you tried hard enough. Even when the laughter had to be bottled up inside her like a corked bottle of sarsaparilla for most of the time.

  She could remember a time, when her real father had been alive, when the little house had been filled with laughter and teasing, when Jack Macartney, with his dry humour, would say something dead-pan and leave Jenny and her mother helpless with giggles.