Poor Sam took a week to die. Dazed and unhappy, Molly nursed him through sleepless nights and endless, pain-filled days while Ellen watched her every movement with dark, venomous eyes. The impulse that had carried Sam out into the lethal foggy night, that had finally destroyed his damaged lungs, she blamed entirely upon Molly. Molly, at first, in exhausted anguish, was inclined to agree with her, until Sam himself, on the third day of his illness, gave her cause to think differently. He had lain, propped on his pillows, watching her as she tidied the room.
“M-Molly?” Every word he uttered was punctuated by the ugly rasp of his breathing. “C-can I ask you something?”
She came to the bedside. “Well, of course. What is it?”
Sam’s thin fingers were picking nervously at the counterpane, his bright-boned consumptive’s face turned suddenly from her.
“Sam?”
He took a deep, rattling breath. “Did Jack—” he coughed, recovered himself. “Did Jack c-come here sometimes? D-during the day, I mean? To see you?”
Silence sang between them. “Who told you such a thing?” No need, truly, to ask.
“M-mother m-mentioned that – he came here sometimes.” He lifted tired eyes to her face at last.
“Once he came. About Nancy. That’s all.” She could not keep the desperate anger from her voice.
He flinched. “O-of course. I’m sorry.” He was painfully flushed.
“Oh, Sam, dear—” She reached for his hand and held it tight. Now she saw how the canker had grown in him. Now she understood. He had come home to an empty house, Danny left with a neighbour, his wife gone, once more and with no explanation, to the Bentons. And in his mind the malicious, poisoned seeds planted by his mother. Had she realized, Molly wondered bitterly, that those seeds would kill the one she loved most in the world? “Jack’s your friend,” she said, “your true friend. You know that, don’t you?”
His face relaxed. “Of course.” He lay in silence for a moment, his cold hand still in hers. “Molly, will you get something for me? In the chest of drawers. The t-top drawer. The little s-statue. I’d like to have it here, where I can see it—”
She opened the drawer, lifted out the chipped and ugly statuette she had bought from the beggar-girl in Stratford – how long ago? Two years. A century. “You’ve still got this?”
“Put it on the table.” He was smiling. For the life of her Molly could not. “Th-thanks. I think I could sleep a little now.”
As, almost blindly, Molly left the room she almost walked into Ellen, standing at the door, openly listening. They stared at one another for one long, hate-filled moment before Molly pushed past Ellen and ran down the stairs.
Between that moment and the time when, in the early hours of the morning, Molly threw her coat over her shoulders and ran, terrified, for the doctor, the two women said not one word to each other. Sam drifted, and sank, and reached a hand desperately to Molly. She held it for hours, until her own was numb, willing her living strength into the frail, failing frame of the dying man, making impossible bargains with the saints and devils who peopled her mind. The baby was next door with the Johnsons; the house was itself deathlike, the atmosphere thick and silent. Ellen’s face was blank with grief and bitterness; and still she shed not one tear.
Molly for her part would not, could not, give up hope entirely; she refused to accept what was plainly before her eyes. The crisis would pass. It would.
But it didn’t, and as she fled down the silent street and pounded at the doctor’s door she knew it to be a wasted effort. As they climbed the stairs they could hear Sam’s voice, a stranger’s voice, strangled and harsh.
“Please, Mother. P-promise me—”
Molly pushed open the door. The pale, shadowed eyes moved to her, as did the dark and unforgiving ones of his mother.
“I’m sorry,” Sam said to Molly; his last words to anyone. A few moments later, choking in blood, he was dead.
The rest of the night passed in a daze of unreality. The doctor was sympathetically efficient. Death and its attendant ceremonies was no stranger to him. He insisted upon administering to Ellen, after a rather worried look at her rigid, grieving face, a small draught to “calm her nerves”.
“It will help her sleep,” he said to Molly, “it might ease her a little. And now, young lady, what about you?” He had fetched Mrs Johnson from next door; the murmur of their voices as they tended Ellen filled the house at this strange hour with more life than it had held all day.
Molly shook her head. “No, thank you. I’m all right.”
“How long is it since you slept?”
She lifted a vague, impatient hand, “I’m – not sure.”
“Or ate?”
She shook her head.
The doctor tutted. “It won’t do, my dear. You’ve a child to consider, as well as yourself, you know. Life goes on. You may not believe it at the moment, but it does—” words he had obviously spoken – how many times? Kindly meant, totally meaningless. Molly looked past him into the darkness beyond his head, the sound of his voice lost before it reached her ears. Sam was dead. Quiet, kind Sam. She saw him as he had been on the day he had first opened the door to her – blushing, tongue-tied. She saw him, laughing, on Stratford Broadway in the glow of the Christmas lights. She felt sad, tired, worn out. But she knew in her heart that even in this Sam had lost; her grief for his death was not as it had been for Harry. And that saddened her more. Poor Sam. She refocussed her eyes upon the doctor’s face. He was holding something out to her.
“There’s a good girl. Drink it up.”
She took the glass obediently, drank a little. “Thank you.”
“I’ll be back in the morning. About eleven.”
She saw him to the door, stood for a moment leaning against the jamb, her head bowed, her mind an utter blank.
Upstairs quiet voices rose and fell; Ellen’s, occasionally strident, foremost of them. The hall swung a little, dizzily, around her. Her eyelids were lead. With the dregs of her strength finally draining from her she walked back into the sitting room and almost fell onto the chaise longue. Within seconds, with her head pillowed on her arms, she was asleep.
She woke to noise – shattering, destructive noise.
She lifted a dazed head. The fog had gone, driven before the rain that dashed against the window and streamed from the gutters. The light was cloud-obscured; it could have been any time, morning or afternoon. From the room above came another crash. She pulled herself to her feet. Her mouth was sour, her head throbbed; she had woken with the dark knowledge of Sam’s death possessing her mind.
Through the ceiling came a quiet, monotonous voice.
Molly went out into the hall, stood at the foot of the stairs, listening. It was Ellen’s voice, that vicious monotone, the words unintelligible, punctuated by violent crashes. The stairs creaked under Molly’s careful feet. At the open door of the room she had shared with Sam she stopped, paralyzed. It was a battleground. Every stitch of clothing, every article that she owned was shredded, smashed, thrown to the floor. The very sheets on the bed had been ripped apart. Paper was everywhere, manic confetti, pages ripped and scattered, from her books. Just inside the door lay the ruined blue leather cover, the pages gone, the copy of Alice that Sam had given her destroyed. A glimmer of blue silk – forget-me-not blue, the colour of summer skies, the colour of Danny’s eyes – caught her eye. She bent and picked it up. The blouse hung in ribbons from her fingers.
Ellen turned. The grotesque stream of obscenities stopped. In her hand she held a mirror, a small hand mirror that Sam had bought Molly for her birthday, the frame of silver decked with plump, laughing cherubs.
“Harlot!” Ellen brought the mirror down with frightening force on the edge of the dressing table. Splinters of light flew in the dark room. “Filthy whore!”
There was nothing to reason with here. The dark face was wild, distorted with hatred. Molly sent a prayer of thanks to heaven that Danny had not been sleeping in this room. His cot stood splintered in the corner. Ellen’s voice lifted to a shriek; in her hand still glinted the shattered mirror.
“Get out of my house! Out! Get to the gutter where you belong.” With a sweep of her arm she emptied the dressing table of pots and bottles and oddments; they flew, spinning, into every corner.
“My things—” said Molly, stupidly.
“Yours? You’ve nothing. You came with nothing. Go the same way. Starve, damn you! Out!” Ellen advanced threateningly. The thickness of a wall away her only son lay still and silent.
Molly turned and ran; there was nothing else to do. Down the stairs, out of the door and into the freezing, streaming rain. She slammed the door behind her, straggled desperately to get the perambulator through the gate, flew to the Johnsons’ door.
“She’s gone mad,” she said, gasping, “mad.” There was no need to explain further; through the upstairs window Ellen could be seen and heard, raving, her movements violent.
“I’ll get the doctor,” Ernest Johnson said.
“Yes, please.”
Danny was screaming, furious at the upset, at his mother’s jerky, frantic movements.
Molly tucked him tight into the pram, “I’ve got to get him away. If she comes after us—” She lifted her head to find Mrs Johnson’s eyes fixed upon her, their expression torn between concern and scandalized delight at this turn of events.
“Where will you take him, dearie? Where will you go? I’d offer you a room here, but—” She glanced half-fearfully through the rain at the house next door.
“It’s all right, thank you, Mrs Johnson” Molly was astonished at the sudden calmness of her own voice. “I’ve friends to go to. They’ll help. I’ll leave the address—” She scribbled on the used envelope the woman handed her. “Perhaps you’d give that to the doctor, in case he needs me?”
She turned the pram. Through the window Ellen had seen her; with a crash that shook the house to its foundations she threw the window up and leaned into the rain screaming, shaking her fist.
Molly stood for a second, drenched to the skin, looking up at the woman in the window. Ellen’s hair dripped dark rat’s tails around her livid face. She fell silent; then she lifted a pointing finger.
“I curse you,” she shouted clearly above the rain, “you and your bastard brat. Curse you. No good will ever come to you from us, from Sam and me. You hear me?”
Molly was walking away, as fast as she could manage, her shoes squelching on her feet, the pram bouncing on the rain-sluiced pavement.
As she turned the corner of Linsey Grove for the last time, above the rain and the baby’s squalling anger she could still hear Ellen’s curses. They followed her, it seemed, for a long time after she was certainly out of earshot.