Footsteps in the Park Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Marie Joseph

  Footsteps in the Park

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Marie Joseph was born in Lancashire and was educated at Blackburn High School for Girls. Before her marriage she was in the Civil Service. She now lives in Middlesex with her husband, a retired chartered Engineer, and they have two married daughters and eight grandchildren.

  Marie Joseph began her writing career as a short-story writer and she now uses her Northern background to enrich her bestselling novels. Down-to-earth characters bring a vivid authenticity to her stories, which are written with both humour and poignancy.

  Her novel A BETTER WORLD THAN THIS won the 1987 Romantic Novelist’s Association Major Award.

  Also by Marie Joseph

  Ring A-Roses

  A Leaf in the Wind

  Emma Sparrow

  The Listening Silence

  Lisa Logan

  Polly Pilgrim

  Clogger’s Child

  A Better World Than This

  Passing Strangers

  A World Apart

  The Travelling Man

  When Love Was Like That

  and Other Stories

  Since He Went Away

  Footsteps in the Park

  Marie Joseph

  One

  STANLEY WAS LATE, and it wasn’t like him. Usually he was there before her.

  ‘Same time, same place,’ he’d said the day before after they’d said their lingering goodbyes at the Corporation Park gates, and Dorothy had watched him walk away from her, dark head bent, as if his addiction to study had weakened his neck muscles, planting his undeniably big feet awkwardly as if he were counting the cracks in the pavement.

  Although it was nearly May, and supposed to be spring, there was a sad soft drizzle in the air, and a sighing wind shivered the branches of the surrounding trees into nebulous shapes. Dorothy shivered and pulled the collar of her navy-blue gaberdine raincoat up round her neck, sinking herself further down into it and moving to the far end of the park bench.

  She met Stanley Armstrong every day, after school finished at four o’clock, to sit close to him in innocent proximity, partially hidden from passers-by by rhododendron bushes and a weeping willow tree, oblivious to anything but their all-consuming and fascinated interest in each other.

  At that time of day, little groups of men, some of whom had been on the dole for long periods since coming home from France in 1918, were making their way home. Shuffling along the paths of the town’s Corporation Park in twos and threes, smoking their Woodbines down to the last fraction of an inch, making their way back to their terraced houses in the narrow winding streets. Flat-capped and morose, with scarves knotted carelessly over collarless shirts made of striped union flannel.

  The Lancashire town, in the depths of the early thirties depression, was a standing on corners, holding its breath kind of place, with the ache of idleness stamped on the faces of its menfolk. The disparity between those who had and those who had not as great as at any time in history.

  Dorothy Bolton, for ever guiltily and romantically conscious of the fact that she was one of those who had, waited impatiently, hugging her leather case with her initials stamped in gold on its lid close to her, glancing down the path and wondering what on earth was keeping Stanley.

  At seventeen and a half, in the sixth form of the local High School for Girls, she filled out her white blouse with high, well-rounded breasts. Breasts that, restrained only by a liberty-bodice, bobbed embarrassingly up and down as she walked with the rest of her form into assembly, causing some of the younger girls to nudge each other and giggle. Her blue and green striped tie was pinned down to the blouse with her prefect’s enamelled badge, and her hat, a much pummelled into shape version of a district nurse’s cap, was tucked away out of sight inside the leather case.

  If she closed her eyes, she told herself, and counted to a hundred, Stanley would be coming towards her when she opened them. He would come along the path from the nearby Grammar School for Boys, his shabby satchel underneath his arm in the only acceptable way of carrying it, his blue prefect’s cap protruding from it, ready to be thrust hastily on his head should he meet a fellow pupil. He would smile at her and sit down beside her, laying one arm across the back of the bench, resting his hand on her shoulder. Ready, if anyone walked past, to lift the hand and pretend to be scratching his head, so as not to compromise her in any way.

  ‘I shall probably join the B.U.F. when I go up to Oxford at the end of the summer,’ he had told her grandly the day before. ‘I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I can’t bring myself to believe that the only way of being radical is to be a Commie. In spite of what Stephen Spender says, Russia’s social set-up doesn’t appeal to me over-much, though they do seem to be escaping the worst of these depressive years.’

  Dorothy sighed, opened her eyes, sighed once more, and closed them again. She knew that she was far from stupid, but she was often completely out of her depth when Stanley talked in that way. Politics were rarely mentioned in the red-brick house called Appleroyd in which she lived, except when her father blamed the bloody Government for his shares going down, or her mother wrinkled her nose at the very mention of the word Socialism.

  Dorothy did have a dream, however, where she was a woman undergraduate up at Oxford, with a little study all her own. Where she would smoke cigarettes in a long holder, and have brilliant conversations with friends sitting on cushions, putting the world to rights, and listening to Benny Goodman’s records. . . .

  ‘I’m sorry I’m late, Dorothy.’

  And Stanley was there, standing in front of her, breathing quickly as if he’d run all the way, and wearing, not his school blazer with Cardinal Wolsey emblazoned on its top pocket, but a tweed jacket and dark-grey flannels which fell in folds over the tops of his shoes. His thin face drooped naturally into lines of perpetual anxiety, but as he stood before her on the asphalt path, Dorothy thought his face held the stunned look of the suddenly bereaved.

  ‘You haven’t been to school, have you? What’s wrong? Have you been ill?’ she asked all in one breath.

  He came and sat down beside her, looked round furtively, then kissed her cheek before taking a stub of a half-smoked cigarette from the top pocket of his jacket.

  ‘Any objection?’ he asked, as he always did.

  Dorothy shook her head, feeling tender towards him because of his gentlemanly concern, then waited patiently until he’d used four matches and disappeared behind the turned-up collar of his jacket before getting the cigarette to light.

  Then at last, as the tip glowed brightly, he said: ‘I can only stop for a minute. I’ve got to get back home. Something awful has happened, something I can’t believe myself.’ He turned dark anguished eyes towards her. ‘My sister’s missing. Our Ruby. We’ve had the police round to our house, asking questions and everything. My mum’s going frantic.’

  He dragged heavily at the cigarette stub, holding it as if it were speared on to the end of a pin; glanced at it as if wondering what it might be, then flicked it over the spiked iron railings bordering the duck pond in front of the be
nch.

  Immediately three brown ducks appeared from behind a sheltering bush, and fell on it with angry, frustrated beaks, and Dorothy put her hand on his sleeve in a comforting gesture.

  ‘You mean she’s left home? Run off, or something?’

  Stanley shook her hand away as if impatient at her lack of understanding. ‘No, not run off. Missing. You know, like you read in the paper. Missing from home. Disappeared.’

  Again the anguish in his eyes dismayed her, and she saw with alarm that he looked as if he’d been crying, as if he might burst into tears there and then. He took her hand and patted it gently between his own. ‘She came home as usual from the mill last night, then she had her tea and got ready to go out. With a friend, she said, but I’ve been telling you for ages how mad she’s got lately when Mum’s tried to ask her where she goes. “I’m sixteen,” she’d say, “and I don’t have to account for my every movement. I’m not a kid at school. I bring good money home.” You know how she is. I’ve told you.’

  Dorothy put her leather case down beside the bench, suddenly feeling its weight on her knees.

  ‘Yes, I know you told me, and we agreed that she was bound to feel resentful working in the mill while you were still at school, especially with you being two years older than her. Maybe she felt it more than you thought, and she’s just gone off to show how unfair she thinks it is.’

  Dorothy warmed to her explanation. ‘Or perhaps she’s had a row with the boy next door she used to go out with. Perhaps she’s been secretly fretting for him ever since they finished?’

  Stanley’s face took on a ‘you haven’t been listening to me’ look, and Dorothy said she was sorry but that she’d only been trying to help.

  His mouth actually quivered. ‘She took nothing. Not her warm coat, not anything. And besides, she’s never been that mad at me or at Eddie Marsden from next door. The police asked Mum to search her room to see what was missing, and it’s all there, even her Post Office book with three pounds in it. She was saving up for the holiday week at the end of July.’ He felt in his pocket for the cigarette stub, and seemed genuinely surprised to find that it was no longer there. ‘They’re saying that foul play can’t be ruled out. You know how they talk . . . I spent most of last night looking for her, going round to her mates’ houses and everything, then this morning, before it came light, I went down to the station.’

  Dorothy felt his worry transfer itself to her, as if a sudden damp weight was holding her still. Silly phrases such as ‘oh well, I expect she’ll turn up’ or ‘she’s probably trying to give you and your mother a fright’ trembled on her lips, but she didn’t say them. How could she, with Stanley sitting beside her on the bench, frozen into anxious silence, pulling at a thread on the sleeve of his jacket, his whole attitude one of such hopelessness that she wanted to put her arms round him and stroke the fear from his thin suffering face?

  Sometimes his long dark face reminded her of pictures of Jesus on the Cross, but she had shied away from the thought, feeling it was more than faintly blasphemous.

  ‘Was Ruby worried about anything? Did she seem worried at all?’ she asked at last, and he muttered that was what the police kept harping on.

  ‘Mum told them that she has three looms in your father’s mill, and that she seems to be popular with the other weavers – that everybody likes her.’

  ‘She’s very pretty,’ he went on, seeing, in his mind’s eye, a picture of his young sister, a girl with his own colouring, a gentle girl with black curly hair falling in wispy tendrils over her forehead, soft-eyed, like a misty portrait of a country maid.

  ‘Some of the questions that chap asked,’ he said, beating one fist into the other. ‘Like was she fond of the lads? Over-fond they meant. Making out that she was a bit of a wrong ’un.’ He swallowed hard so that the Adam’s apple in his throat moved up and down. ‘Mum told him straight that the only boy she’s ever been out with is Eddie Marsden next door, and when they checked with him down at the Co-op where he works they found that he’d been in the house all last night.’

  Dorothy at last began to see the seriousness of it all. ‘How awful!’ she said, shaking her head from side to side. ‘Is there anything I can do? I have a shorthand and typing lesson in an hour’s time, but I can go home now and tell my mother I’m going down to your house . . .’

  ‘Oh, she’d like that all right,’ Stanley said with bitterness. ‘No, there’s nothing anyone can do really, and I’d best be getting back.’ He got to his feet, pushing himself up from the bench like an old man with an arthritic hip. ‘I won’t be going back to school till this lot’s sorted out, but I’ll try and come here again tomorrow.’ He rubbed at his forehead with a clenched fist, then without saying goodbye, started to walk away from her, his head bent as usual, his elbows tucked close into his sides like a long-distance runner.

  Dorothy watched him go, then picked up her case. She had a suspicion that his mother cut his hair, as the back always had a kind of torn and ragged look about it. She often thought poetically that it gave him an added vulnerability. Then she started off in the opposite direction, walking as quickly as she could without drawing attention to herself by actually running, because she was late. . . .

  ‘Your Dorothy’s late home from school,’ Ethel Rostron remarked in a conversational tone to her sister,. Phyllis Bolton. Then she rubbed a satisfactory pinch of salt in the wound. ‘Is she still friendly with that boy called Stanley Armstrong, out of Inkerman Street?’

  ‘She has netball practice,’ Phyllis said quickly, family loyalty decreeing that she didn’t let the side down, even if she did happen to be worried out of her mind. Why her younger daughter had to be so different from her sister Margaret, she couldn’t think. But then they’d always been like chalk and cheese, the one conforming, and the other always thinking the opposite of what her mother felt she should be thinking.

  She patted her hair, but only gingerly as it had been set that morning at the new salon in King Edward Street. An urge to confide her worries to her sister struggled with the desire to keep up her end at all costs. Though it was all very well, she thought privately, for Ethel to be smug, just because her daughter Beryl hadn’t even looked at a boy as yet.

  ‘Chance is a fine thing,’ she pondered nastily, mentally comparing her own two daughters’ fair-haired prettiness with Beryl’s own sallow, straight-haired plainness.

  ‘I believe his sister has three looms in Matthew’s mill?’

  Ethel was all set to get her own back, her jealousy over Margaret’s recent engagement to the highly eligible Gerald Tomlin getting the better of her. Gerald, who had come up from London to work as an accountant in Matthew Bolton’s mill, was staying with her until the wedding, and his suave manners, plus his undisputed charm, made her sick to her very stomach with envy at times. Beryl was to be bridesmaid along with her cousin Dorothy at the wedding in June, and even a mother’s love couldn’t gloss over the fact that the pale-green taffeta chosen for the dresses would enhance Dorothy’s pink and white complexion, whilst making Beryl look as if she were just getting over one of her frequent bilious attacks.

  ‘I’ve heard tell his mother, Mrs Armstrong I mean, takes in washing, and has done ever since her husband died two years ago. Poor soul,’ Ethel added with insincerity.

  She was eating afternoon tea at her sister’s house, Appleroyd, the biggest of the big red-brick houses overlooking the Corporation Park. Eating with her coat off whilst keeping her hat on.

  Keeping one’s hat on in the afternoon went with wearing white gloves in Summer, with a spare pair in one’s handbag, and with pulling the lavatory chain before one actually sat down so that no one within earshot would know what one was doing. Although Ethel could be earthy and explicit in her language when she chose, she was a great one for inserting ones and whoms into her speech, and usually managed to get them in the right place. The hat toned with her grey tweed dress, and had ear-flaps to show it had been modelled on Amy Johnson’s flying helmet.

/>   ‘They say the poor woman had three “misses” before she managed this boy and his sister,’ she said, adjusting the hat with one hand, and reaching for a scone with the other. ‘Why their sort always goes in for big families beats me. Goodness knows, French letters are cheap enough.’ She pretended not to see Phyllis’s expression of disgust. ‘Goodness knows, me and Raymond managed without much trouble, though after what I went through with bringing our Beryl into the world I do admit he’s always been extra careful, if you know what I mean?’ Phyllis obviously did but wasn’t prepared to acknowledge it, so she went on, lowering her voice to avoid being overheard by her sister’s daily help, a Mrs Wilkinson, working in the kitchen across the hallway. ‘Are the Armstrongs Catholics?’

  ‘The boy would be at St. Teresa’s College if they were,’ Phyllis said, trying not to look as irritated as she felt. ‘He’s at the Grammar School, and they’re Chapel, or so I believe.’

  ‘Well, as long as they’re something that’s the main thing,’ Ethel said, ‘and I’ve known some quite nice Methodists,’ she went on. She bit into the scone, and a shower of crumbs lodged on her massive shelf of a bosom, made bolster-shaped by the insertion of strategically placed darts in her bust bodice.

  They stared at each other for a while with sisterly appraisal, their mouths munching rhythmically.

  ‘Your Mrs Wilkinson has a light hand with scones,’ Ethel said, reaching for her third. ‘You’ve been lucky to hang on to her all these years, Phyl. My Mrs Greenhalgh has no more idea of how to bottom a room than fly. It takes her a full half hour to clean my front bay. More interested in what’s going on in the road than in what she’s doing. You’d think with all this unemployment about she’d want to impress, knowing how many women there are queueing up to earn a few extra shillings a week.’

  Phyllis nodded. ‘Yes, I know. But they take it from their dole money, Ethel, since this Means Test came in, so it hardly makes it worth their while working.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Mrs Wilkinson is lucky because her husband has a steady job, even though he is on short time at the moment.’