A Respectable Woman Read online

  She hung up Stan’s shirt and slid beneath the bedclothes. The mattress dipped as Stan plonked down on the edge to peel off his socks and pull his pyjama jacket over his vest, his shoulder muscles rippling before disappearing beneath the blue-and-white stripes. He had been thin when they met. Strong, though, in a wiry way. He had filled out since.

  ‘Alf been good?’ His back was to her as he did up his buttons.

  ‘He helped me clean out the ash pan. He looked like a chimney sweep when he’d finished.’ She smiled: it was time. ‘Something funny happened.’

  ‘Oh aye?’

  ‘The district nurse turned up, asking to see the baby, and she had my name.’

  Stan looked down, checking his buttons. She waited for his reaction.

  ‘Just a mistake, love. A daft mistake. You’d expect better of them nurses.’

  Only he didn’t look round as he said it. Nell’s skin tingled. To look round, to frown, to laugh – that would have been natural. He hadn’t even answered immediately, which you would expect him to do if he was surprised.

  She stared at his blue-and-white-clad back.

  Stan knew. Something was going on and Stan knew.

  Nell dropped Alf off with Mrs Hibbert, then went to the Royal Oak, where she made her excuses: she needed to see the doctor. Mr Page wasn’t pleased, but she was adamant. She set off at a brisk pace. What was she was doing? She didn’t know. And why was she doing it? Same answer. Don’t know and don’t know. All she knew for certain was that she was boiling with determination as she marched across town to the district nurses’ building, known for some reason as their station, which made them sound like railway porters. When she got there, she would … well, she would see about that when the time came.

  The nurses’ station didn’t look all that big from the front, but it must stretch out at the back, because the nurses lived there as well. Poor creatures. Not much chance of meeting a fellow and settling down if you had to shin down a drainpipe to do your courting. Mind you, there was a shortage of men since the war, so maybe these lasses had done well for themselves, having bed and board provided. And no husband meant no one to drink the wages.

  As she went in, the smell of disinfectant swarmed up her nose. There was a long corridor, its doors closed, except for one. Nell glanced in: an office, with a woman standing behind a desk, shuffling through a stack of papers. She wore a brown costume that was lifted out of the ordinary by gold buttons and braid, and shiny brown beads, a long set that almost reached her waist. Fancy wearing beads to work!

  The woman looked at her in an equally assessing way but without the admiration. ‘Can I help you?’

  Nell lifted her chin. She wouldn’t get a second chance at this. ‘One of the nurses came out to me yesterday, but there was a mix-up over the address. Please could you—’

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘Hibbert, Mrs Stanley.’

  ‘One moment.’ The woman flicked through the pages in a large notebook. ‘Hibbert … Hibbert. Nurse Beddow was down to see a Mrs Hibbert of 14 Vicarage Lane.’

  Nell’s innards froze. ‘Mrs Stanley Hibbert?’

  ‘Mrs Stanley Hibbert of 14 Vicarage Lane. Is that incorrect?’

  She cast an impatient glance at Nell. It pierced Nell’s natural respect for authority and made her feel impatient too.

  ‘I’ll let you know.’

  A big bass drum boomed inside her chest.

  14 Vicarage Lane.

  Her feet took her through the market square and over the bridge. Courtesy of the dye-works, the river was running blue today, not a natural water-blue, but the colour of peacock feathers. Right colour, wrong shade. Like yesterday with Nurse Beddow. Right name, wrong address.

  14 Vicarage Lane.

  ‘Oh, lummee,’ said Nurse Beddow’s voice in her head.

  Vicarage Lane. It conjured up a picture of a winding path and butterflies dancing among the cow parsley, windows thrown open to the sunshine beneath a row of thatched roofs. Mind you, anyone might think the same of Lark Street. Vicarage Lane was pretty much like Lark Street, two long rows of old terraces, though the Vicarage Lane dwellings, being nearer the bottom of the hill, were older and smaller. Lower ceilings.

  She ground to a halt at the corner. She wanted to dash home and hide. She wanted to march up Vicarage Lane and demand to know what the ruddy hallelujah was going on. She wanted to pretend Nurse Beddow had never come round, her and her ‘Oh, lummee’. She wanted to confront Stan, because he knew. Whatever it was, he knew. She wanted it to go away. She wanted it never to have happened.

  Anything she wanted had flown out the window when Stan didn’t turn and look at her last night.

  She forced her feet to take her to number 14.

  Except for the number, it might have been her own front door. The same dark green. Someone walked over her grave. Even now it wasn’t too late to run away. Yes, it was. The moment Stan didn’t turn and look her in the eye last night, it was too late. She rapped hard on the door. A sound on the other side sent a sheen of fear blooming across her skin. The door swished open and there was an answering swish in her stomach.

  She looked down at a fair-haired young woman. That was nothing new: she had been looking down at the other girls all her life. This stranger had the soft-edged plumpness that said a baby had recently been born. The tiredness in the face said the same thing, a blissful tiredness that hadn’t yet reached the exhausted stage.

  Nell peeled her tongue off the roof of her mouth. ‘Mrs Hibbert?’

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘Are you married to …?’ Her voice failed her.

  ‘To Stan.’

  Stan. Nell went trembly all over, as if she was about to crumple on the step.

  The other Mrs Hibbert’s eyes widened. ‘There’s never been an accident at the works, has there?’

  ‘No, no.’ Was she actually reassuring this woman? ‘Does he work at the furniture factory?’

  ‘Aye, he’s an upholsterer.’

  ‘Do you work there too?’

  ‘Nay, I’ve not worked since we moved in here.’ She laughed. ‘Well, I say I haven’t, but running round after a two-year-old is harder than working on the factory line any day.’

  A two-year-old? A two-year-old!

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Stan’s other wife. ‘Why are you asking after my husband?’

  He’s not your husband. He’s my husband. Go on, say it. But she couldn’t. Didn’t want it said out loud, because that would make this situation real. And then it became more real than she could ever have imagined. A small child trotted down the hall to cling to his mummy’s skirt, thumb plugged into his mouth. A two-year-old with sandy hair and blue eyes like Stan.

  Sandy hair and blue eyes like Alf.

  Chapter Two

  By the time Nell had walked up the hill, her marriage was over. No confrontation was needed, not with Stan’s fancy piece and not with Stan. There was nowt to say. Well, there was plenty to say, obviously, preferably while chucking the fire irons at Stan’s treacherous head, but what was the point? The marriage was over. She had to make plans.

  She didn’t go into the house the front way, not wanting to be spotted by neighbours who would wonder what she was doing home at this time. Instead she sneaked up the back entry, lifting the latch on the wooden gate. The brown paint was peeling and now she knew why. The stray cat appeared from nowhere and tried to wind itself round her ankles, but she stepped away. A hopeful cat was the last thing she needed.

  What she needed was a foolproof plan. What she needed was money. What she needed was a trustworthy husband, who could keep the family jewels inside his trousers.

  She stopped dead, right there between the privy and the coal bunker. The world tilted up and down, side to side, forwards and backwards, all at the same time. Forget morning sickness. This was full-blown seasickness. Stan wasn’t having a fling. This was a long-standing relationship. With a house. And children. Children – plural. Another marriage. Another Mrs Hib
bert, who was a housewife, if you please, while the real Mrs Stanley Hibbert waded through phlegm and vomit and excrement and scrubbed out stinking urinals in a backstreet piss-house, and that was bad language, and that was wrong even if it wasn’t out loud. Sorry, Mum.

  She lurched to the back door, her knees as feeble as underdone rice pudding. She bent to retrieve the spare key from under the flowerpot. The cat appeared and she swatted it away, though not hard. She couldn’t abide cruelty or bullying. Thank goodness she had her gloves on. Bare fingers might have felt how cold the cat was. She couldn’t be responsible for it.

  She let herself into the scullery and leant against the sink. Through the window she saw the back gate, brown and peeling. Her heart froze.

  ‘That back gate could do with a lick of paint,’ she had suggested shortly after Stan had painted the front door. ‘There’ll be enough left over from the front.’

  ‘Nice idea, love, but there isn’t enough paint.’

  ‘Is that you trying to get out of doing a job, Stan Hibbert?’ She slid her arms round his waist and snuggled close. Sometimes Stan took a bit of persuading.

  ‘Nay, love, there isn’t enough.’

  And there wasn’t, either. Later, she found the tin on a shelf in the cellar and prised the lid off with a screwdriver, and Stan was right. The tin was almost empty. She must have been mistaken. It was the only explanation.

  No, it wasn’t. It was merely the obvious explanation. More obvious than Stan buggering off down the hill to tart up his other front door.

  Bastard.

  ‘Bastard,’ she whispered.

  Terrible word. Their Doug had said it once and Mum had washed his mouth out with soap. There was no stopping Mum when she was riled and never mind that Doug was a strapping fifteen-year-old bringing in a wage.

  Talking of wages, Stan’s clearly hadn’t all gone across the bar at the Royal Oak. All this time, she had marvelled that the man who could drink the brewery dry didn’t have a vast beer gut. Now it turned out that he was just a common or garden cheating husband.

  Well, no, not a common or garden cheat. A full-blown bigamous cheat with another wife and family and a second rent book. That was where the money had gone. That was why she had had to go out to work, to scrape by in Lark Street while Stan supported Vicarage Lane. The other Mrs Hibbert didn’t go out to work. Talk about adding insult to injury.

  The other Mrs Hibbert stopped at home with her children.

  She barged through the kitchen into the parlour, throwing her coat over the back of the armchair. First things first. She couldn’t do anything without money – no. That wasn’t first. She pounded upstairs into their bedroom. Her ears were crammed with the banging of her heart, but when she stood in front of the chest of drawers, the world fell silent, as though she had fallen into a snowdrift. She took out her little wooden box with the carved top. Grandpa had made it for Nan when they were fourteen. Inside lay Mum’s wedding ring. Nell twisted her own ring. She meant to remove it slowly, deliberately, in a moment of deep significance, but it stuck. Fury gripped her and she wrenched it off, almost taking the skin off her knuckle with it. It had meant the world to her, but Stan had rendered it worthless. But she still had a ring that meant the world. Her heart folded in half as she slipped on Mum’s ring. This was her wedding ring now – no, her respectability ring. Proof of widowhood.

  She looked at her old ring. She felt like chucking it down the privy, but she wrapped it in a handkerchief and took it downstairs. Now for the money. She opened the sideboard drawer and slid her hand under the linen, feeling for the old frayed envelope containing a week’s spare rent, just in case. Stan didn’t know about it or about the Mazawattee tea tin at the back of the pantry, where she kept the odd coppers she saved. When your husband didn’t hand over his full pay packet, you learnt to hoard, sixpence here, tuppence there. Even a farthing made a difference. Occasionally, she emptied the tin and stashed the money in her post office savings account.

  Then she opened the cupboard under the stairs, ducking her head so as not to crack it on the underbelly of the staircase as she reached for the old carpet bag. She took it into the parlour and dumped it on the table. The candlesticks, the clock: they must be worth summat. She stood them beside the bag. Her blue-and-white vase. Her heart gave a sharp creak inside her chest. The vase used to be Mum’s, and before that Nan’s. When Nell was a lass, Nan had kept it on a high-up shelf and Nell had gazed up at it, loving it even then. Her heart said not to part with it, but what did her heart know? Her heart had said to marry Stan.

  What else? A couple of brass ornaments; a stack of sheet music from inside the piano stool. The framed studio portrait of her and Stan on their wedding day, herself skinny with grief but with hope shining in her eyes, Stan handsome in his uniform, and his mother on his other side. Honestly, who had their mother-in-law in their wedding photograph? But she had loved Olive Hibbert every bit as much as she had loved Stan back then.

  ‘Olive Hibbert, widow’, was how Mrs Hibbert had introduced herself when Stan had presented Nell to her.

  Was she meant to say, ‘Nell Pringle, orphan’? That was what she was. Orphaned, everyone dead, her world blown apart. The bleakness had overwhelmed her and she dissolved into tears. Olive Hibbert took her into her arms. Stan put one arm round her, the other round his mother; and Nell had felt safe and loved and wanted in a way she had thought was lost to her for ever. Something stirred inside her broken Pringle heart and she knew she was going to be a Hibbert.

  She turned the frame over to unclip the back and flipped the photograph out, depositing it – face up, face down, she didn’t look – on the mantelpiece before she reassembled the frame and popped it on the table. From the sideboard drawers she took the boxed set of fish knives, her table linen and spare antimacassars; from the cupboard underneath came the glass bowl she used for her Christmas trifle. How proud she had been to place a trifle on the table for the first time. How married she had felt.

  Had Stan dreaded her trifle, her Christmas pudding, her tin of mince pies, knowing he would have to force down the same things all over again in his other house? How long had his so-called wife been in residence in Vicarage Lane? That little boy was two, so say Stan had met her a year before – that would have been almost as soon as he came home for good in 1919. That couldn’t be right. She must be mistaken.

  But the child’s age proved it.

  Nell dropped onto the wooden chair next to the sideboard. Two years ago, she had suffered her miscarriage. Stan had been expecting two children at the same time and she had lost hers. No wonder he had been stunned. Was it guilt that had floored him? Now he had done the double again, only this time he didn’t know about her baby. And never would. She would put his name on the birth certificate because she and the baby were entitled to that, but that would be the beginning and end of Stan’s involvement in this child’s life.

  When she was gone, he and Mrs Vicarage Lane could have a dozen sandy-haired miniature Stanleys for all she cared, but her Alf would never know.

  Dumping the carpet bag behind a crate in the yard round the back of the Royal Oak, Nell went round the front and let herself in. The tables wanted polishing, the floor hadn’t been swept, the ashtrays overflowed.

  Mr Page was behind the bar. ‘There you are at last. Take your coat off and get fettling.’

  ‘I can’t. I’ve took bad ways.’

  ‘You look all right to me.’

  ‘I need medicine. Otherwise you won’t see me for a week, like as not.’

  ‘A week? You can’t be sick that long. Who’ll do the cleaning?’

  ‘If I get medicine, I’ll soon be back, but I can’t get it without my wages.’

  ‘I s’pose I’ve got no choice. You’ll not get nowt for today, mind.’

  ‘I wouldn’t expect it.’ Not from him, the old skinflint. Do someone a good turn? Henry Page? You must be joking.

  The drawer of the cash register flew open and he pawed through the little boxes. ‘The
re y’are.’ He clattered a handful of change on the counter.

  ‘It’s a bob short.’

  ‘I’ll add it to your next pay.’

  ‘I’ll have it now, if it’s all the same to you.’

  He slapped a shilling on the counter. ‘And who’s going to do the cleaning while you’ve took to your sickbed?’

  ‘Ask Mrs Page.’

  Mr Page’s mouth dropped open. Mrs Page, with her swaying hips and powdered face, wouldn’t recognise a mop if one got up and bit her on the bum.

  Nell left, letting the door swing shut behind her. She collected the carpet bag and headed down the hill, using the back alleys, praying no one she knew would see her skulking down to town. The backs of her eyes stung. Oh, the shame. She had never in her life set foot inside the pawnbroker’s. Mum must be turning in her grave.

  Emerging into the market square, she held her head high, as if carrying a carpet bag was a perfectly natural thing to do, then dived into the side street where the three balls hung over a door. With a final glance round to ensure she wasn’t being watched, she went in.

  The dark-suited pawnbroker stood behind a glass-topped counter, beneath which lay trays of medals, jewellery, cutlery, trinket boxes, christening spoons, you name it. Behind the counter were racks of clothes as well as shelves housing a mishmash of larger items, stuffed animals, wax fruit, boots, hat boxes, vases, kettles – kettles? How could anyone pawn their kettle? She couldn’t manage without hers.

  ‘I’ve a few things I’d like to … hand in.’

  She emptied the carpet bag, putting her items on the counter, where the pawnbroker spread them out. She must look like a travelling pedlar.

  ‘Your husband’s suit. I normally take those in on Mondays, not Fridays.’ Did he think her another scrimping housewife, pawning the old man’s suit till Saturday afternoon, ready for church on Sunday? ‘… Fish knives, ivory-handled, velvet-lined case … carriage clock, eight-day movement … sheets, pillowcases … more of the same …’