Chapter Two

It was a long road for a wee girl to walk from Gorbals Cross but Rosie reminded herself that she was no longer a wee girl. She was a woman, or nearly so.

If it hadn’t been that she couldn’t hear very well she’d have been out of school and earning good money like her sisters. It was largely her own fault she’d got stuck with the Saturday chore, however. She was the one who’d learned the ropes, in a manner of speaking, since that time a year ago when Mammy had come down with a chill in the kidneys and Babs, who pretended to be scared of Alex O’Hara, had dug in her heels and turned on the waterworks and Polly, who was in charge when Mammy was sick, had nabbed her, wee Rosalind, and said, ‘You’ll just have to do it,’ by which Polly meant go and pay O’Hara his money at the Rowing Club in Molliston Street.

And Rosie had nodded. ‘Okay.’

She had been a wee girl then – a year had made all the difference – and consequently she hadn’t been afraid of O’Hara.

Besides, she couldn’t hear his nasty voice, not unless he roared. Even then it sounded just faintly annoying, like the wail of the whistle from the UCBS bakery that made everybody else jump if they happened to be in the vicinity.

That first time, she’d been dressed in bits of the uniform that had recently become mandatory apparel – how she loved the look of that phrase – for pupils at the Institute: a neat little grey skirt that didn’t even cover your knees, ankle socks, one-bar shoes, a blouse with a yoke collar and a greeny-grey cardigan, all of which Mammy had purchased without protest, though Babs had gone hysterical at the amount of money it had cost. Mr Feldman had offered to find a benefactor but Mammy wouldn’t hear of it and had gone to Mr Manone again and he, apparently, had come through with the goods.

Then, rather ironically, she, Rosie, had been the one who’d had to make the trip to the Rowing Club, down among the warehouses and sheds at that point where the Clyde starts to turn back on itself and you don’t know whether you’re in Kingston, Kinning Park or Govan. All she knew, that first day, was that Molliston Street wasn’t near the room above Denzil’s public house or the basement in Grove Street or the unnameable place by the railway that she was just barely old enough to remember but that still gave Polly the creeps.

Pint glass in hand, a cigarette sticking out of the corner of his mouth, Alex O’Hara had peered at her, then, twigging what was wrong, had made the sort of kissing motions that you make to a baby or a budgerigar before she’d had a chance to take the fiver from her top pocket and offer it to him; a gesture that had caused Mr O’Hara great consternation and made the men in the background hoot with laughter.

He’d pushed her away, finger prodding into her shoulder, pushed her out of the lobby of the Rowing Club and into the alcove where the men’s lavatory was. He’d raged at her for a second or two, then, relenting, he’d put the fiver in one pocket of his long overcoat, had fished a sixpence from another and had offered it to her.

She’d shaken her head.

‘Wha-aat?’ he’d said, making his lips move properly for the first time. ‘Ta-aake it, da-aarlin’. It’s for you.’

She’d pointed at the cigarette in his mouth and with an extravagant wave of the hand, cribbed from Gloria Swanson, had indicated that she wanted a smoke. Mr O’Hara had laughed, had taken a packet from his pocket – Gold Flake, not Woodbine – had counted out three cigarettes and had given them to her. She’d tucked them safe away in her pocket. Then he’d taken another ciggie from the packet and had pushed it against her lips. Then he’d put the pint glass carefully down on the floor and had fumbled for and found a matchbox and had struck a match and had lit the cigarette in her mouth.

She’d inhaled deeply, throwing her head back and blowing out smoke in a long, moist, vampy plume the way she and Babs rehearsed in the bedroom when Mammy was out and they could find nothing better to do with themselves.

Mr O’Hara had uttered a naughty word – she could always lip-read the naughty words – and red-faced and flustered had shoved her out of the front door into Molliston Street.

She hadn’t told Polly or Mammy what had happened but, even when Mammy was well again, she volunteered for the job and, once a month thereafter, dressed in her Institute uniform, had walked all the way to Molliston Street to pay Alex O’Hara his blood money.

Rosalind Conway might be deaf, but she certainly wasn’t daft. She knew who Alex O’Hara was, how he made his dough and why everyone was afraid of him. He was the man you saw about borrowing money when you had nothing left to pawn. He was the man who would come after you if you didn’t shell out. He was the man who would cut your face open with the cut-throat razor he kept in the pocket of his double-breasted suit.

He was the Collector.

And she had him under her thumb.

*   *   *

Polly explained it to her on the day she turned sixteen. Polly took her out to the Black Cat Café as a birthday treat, just the two of them. She bought ice-cream and, using the mixture of signs and round vowels by which they communicated when she, Rosie, didn’t want to use the little tin-plated trumpet, told her that it wasn’t Mammy who’d gone into hock with O’Hara but their old man, Daddy, long gone now and probably dead.

Rosie asked why the debt hadn’t died with Daddy. Polly shook her head, and told her it wasn’t like that with the crowd O’Hara worked for and that Daddy had also worked for, a long time ago.

‘Daddy did die in the war, didn’t he?’ Rosie asked.

‘Missing,’ Polly answered. ‘Believed killed.’

‘He was a Highlander, wasn’t he – a kiltie?’

She wasn’t able to get her tongue around the words. They felt flat and quacky in her mouth. When she spoke like this to anyone who didn’t know her they thought she was weak in the head. But Polly was used to it. Polly still worked with her sometimes, though less patiently than Mr Feldman or Miss Fyfe, teaching her to blow and suck, ta-ta and la-la so that she could feel the resonance of the words in her throat.

The tin-plated hearing trumpet that Mr Feldman had finally managed to obtain for her had helped a little, for then, when she spoke slowly and softly, she could hear where she was going wrong.

She hated the trumpet, though. It seemed to anounce her deficiency, make her visibly different from everyone else. She never used the trumpet with Alex O’Hara and had already vowed to herself that she never would. In any case, after her third or fourth visit to the Ferryhead Rowing Club, she could make out what he was saying well enough, even although he hardly moved his lips.

None of the things that Polly told her that day in the Black Cat Café came as much of a surprise.

She might have missed most of the family conversations that went on but she was blessed with sharp eyes and an ability to concentrate and had already guessed that Alex O’Hara, with his long overcoat, soft felt hat and scar like a tribal mark, was part of a shadowy nether world to which her mother remained connected by dint of that long-ago marriage to Frank Conway.

‘Yes, honey,’ Polly told her. ‘Daddy was a kiltie. He fought at the Western Front and we never found out what happened to him.’

‘Did he steal money from Alex O’Hara?’

‘No, from old Mr Manone.’

‘Is that what Mammy’s still paying for?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘When will it all be paid back?’

Polly pulled a face. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Would you like me to ask Mr O’Hara?’

‘No,’ Polly shouted, then, embarrassed, leaned across the empty ice-cream dishes and, articulating very precisely, said, ‘No. You must not say anything to Alex O’Hara. Do you understand me, Rosie? You must not go asking questions.’

‘He would tell me, you know.’

‘He would cut your throat as quick as look at you.’

‘No. He likes me.’

‘Has he told you he likes you?’

‘He gives me ciggies and chocolate.’

‘Has he…’ For an instant Polly was at a loss for the right word or sign. ‘Has he – tried to touch you?’

‘I wouldn’t let him.’

And that was the truth.

Mr O’Hara just grinned when she played up to him, when she put on the airs and graces that Babs had taught her. He seemed pleased that she wasn’t afraid of him in spite of his line of work, in spite of the evidence of the thin white scar on his cheekbone. In any case she was never with him for long, ten minutes at most, either out on the pavement in the quiet Saturday evening street or, if it was pouring, just inside the lobby near the lavatory.

‘Are you sure he hasn’t tried to touch you?’

‘No-ope.’

She stared into Polly’s eyes and put on a weak, pouting expression as if she really were half daft. It was a look she could do to perfection, a look that made people think twice – practically everyone, except Mr Feldman who got riled whenever she tried it on with him.

‘If he does,’ Polly said, ‘if O’Hara ever does…’

‘Tell you.’

‘Aye, not Mammy.’ A finger to the breastbone. ‘Tell me first.’

There were times when Rosie thought it might be fun to have Alex O’Hara touch her.

She’d been touched once before – by Gordon Porlock, who was a full mute and had been at the Institute with her since they were both eight years old.

Gordon Porlock had gone all odd this past year or so, angry and odd. He had caught her by the arm one day in the back corridor, had tried to kiss her, had rubbed himself against her and had groped up her skirt. She had kicked him, screamed at him soundlessly, mouth wide open, registering not fright or horror but pure indignation. He had backed away, had turned and fled down the corridor, holding not his shin but his crotch. From that day on Gordon had avoided her like the plague, and she had watched Polly and Babs talk with renewed interest, and had kidded herself that she knew how to handle men.

Besides, she was beginning to like the way Mr O’Hara treated her. How he would be out on the pavement waiting for her to turn the corner at the top of Molliston Street. How he would wave a welcome, removing one hand from his pocket and fashioning a sign, like someone swearing an oath.

As soon as she’d parted with the fiver he would smile and when he stood close to her, pint glass in hand, she would feel quite safe and protected.

Alex O’Hara was much older than she was, of course. Ten years at least. That didn’t matter. In fact it was better. She’d seen what happened to girls who wedded young chaps. Two or three years, two or three bairns into the marriage and you would be struggling to make do on dole money and your figure would be gone for good. And hubby would be down the pub every night, scrounging drink while you were stuck in Lavender Court or Keane Street trying to stop the rot. Rosie knew that Babs had nothing but scorn for girls who jumped into marriage. Babs was for ever shouting that she wasn’t going to get caught in that trap, not her, would never go out with boys who didn’t have money to spend or let any boys she did go out with have more than a ‘nibble’, whatever that meant.

Because Rosie was still attending the Institute and wore its uniform she had never had a boyfriend. You didn’t meet proper boyfriends in the Institute. You met boyfriends at the corner up by Gorbals Cross where she was forbidden to loiter or in the Black Cat Café late at night or, best of all, up town at the roller-skating rink. You could meet them too at Socialist Sunday School dances or on Jewish pipe band picnics but Mammy would have had a fit if any of her girls, any of her prized possessions, had suggested consorting with Jews or Communists, though as far as Rosie could make out Jews and Communists were among the nicest people you could meet.

Alex O’Hara, then, was her very first boyfriend.

He met her by arrangement every fourth of fifth Saturday down in Molliston Street, in the deserted cul-de-sac away from the Ibrox football crowd and the bedlam of the Paisley Road. He never suggested making a date with her. Rosie reckoned he was just shy or, more likely, that he’d encountered Mammy and was as wary of crossing her mother as most other chaps seemed to be, even if Alex was a bigwig and had a bad reputation.

Anyway it was simpler to pretend that he was her boyfriend.

It made the walk from Gorbals Cross seem purposeful and exciting. She even kidded herself that Alex wouldn’t mind if she turned up without the fiver some Saturday, that perhaps then he would draw her gently into the doorway or walk hand in hand with her down towards the river and there on the ash pad – where horses had been kept to pull the ferry in the olden days – there he would kiss her. She speculated on what his pinched, rather frozen mouth would feel like, if it would be as cold as it looked or if the touch of her lips would instantly ignite the flames of passion.

Now and then, not often, she saw Alex in the Gorbals or Laurieston.

Unplanned and unexpected, the encounters gave her a start and reminded her that Alex didn’t spend his entire life waiting for her on the pavement outside the Ferryhead Rowing Club. When they met by chance Alex would pretend not to notice her or, if she waved, would lower his head and nod reluctantly. Only once had he spoken. ‘What’re you doin’ at Gorbals Cross?’ he’d said. ‘Is it not past your bedtime, a wee girl like you?’ She hadn’t made him out clearly, though, and had given him a big beaming smile in lieu of an answer. And he had shrugged and gone strolling on about his business.

It was easy to foster the illusion that Alex O’Hara, the Collector, was her boyfriend, to convince herself that when she knew him better she would be able to wheedle out of him what she wanted: not cigarettes, not bars of Five Boys chocolate, not even stolen kisses by the riverside but the sort of information that Polly and Babs refused to share with her.

So she came striding briskly down Paisley Road in the witching hour between twilight and full dark, extra careful of tramcars laden with football supporters and buses that swept too close to the pavements.

She dodged nimbly among the shoppers until the two big arc-lamps that lit up the front of Gerber’s clothing factory came in sight. Then she switched her concentration up to full blast and sped across the thoroughfare, holding her hat with one hand and cupping the other round her left ear to separate the clash and clatter of trams from the dangerous hiss of motorcars and buses.

She darted into Congleton Street, turned into the top of Molliston Street and saw Alex in the distance, waiting for her, same as he always was – only different. It wasn’t a subtle difference. Oh, no. A blind man could have spotted it. Rosie let out a throaty little squeal of delight.

She came up to him and looked him up and down.

‘Are you going to a wedding then?’ she asked, as distinctly as possible.

He shook his head. Her appraisal disconcerted him. He was, Rosie thought, very easily disconcerted.

She said, ‘You look real nice. I have never seen a man in a monkey suit before, not outside a tailor’s window.’

‘Got the money?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

She took the banknote from her pocket and held it up. It was folded into the shape of a taper, longer than it was broad. He suited the suit, and the suit suited him. She would have told him that too if she could have got her tongue around the words without fumbling.

Mischievously, she waved the banknote before him.

He snatched at it with his left hand. He wore a wristlet watch on an expanding band. Cuff-links. He had shaved very cleanly and the dark shadow of stubble was all beneath the skin. His jet black hair was slicked back and his features seemed less prominent, less rapacious. He appeared comfortable in the formal outfit, as if he had been born into silver-spoon society and had somehow become misplaced.

In fact, he looked almost harmless.

She wafted the note about.

He was not a large man and looked as if he should be nippy on his feet but he flapped ineffectually, his reactions slower than she would have anticipated. Momentarily intoxicated by her superiority, she giggled. Then he snatched at her, not the note. He grabbed her arms first then her forearm and hip, fingers digging into her thigh through her school skirt.

‘I was only teasing,’ Rosie got out, the words clumsy with dismay.

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t come it wi’ me, not where money’s concerned.’

He plucked the banknote from her fingers, released her and stepped back.

She could still feel his fingers squeezing her hip. She wriggled, straightened her knickers, adjusted her skirt.

She didn’t know whether to be indignant or tearful. It hadn’t occurred to her to treat him roughly as she’d treated Gordon Porlock, and it dawned on her at that moment that she really knew nothing about men after all.

She said, ‘I am sorry.’

He eyed her, head back.

The fiver had already vanished into one of his pockets and a small, hesitant smile seemed to be hovering on the corner of his lips.

She felt hot all over.

‘Is it a wedding you’re dressed up for?’ she said, at length.

‘Nah.’ He seemed not just reluctant but almost incapable of answering an innocent question. He glanced over his shoulder at the doors of the Rowing Club – propped wide open tonight – then forced himself to admit, ‘Dinner, a testimonial dinner. Know what that means, kid?’

Inside the club she could make out other men in monkey suits, black and bulky against the whisky-coloured light that filtered from the bar. It looked secretive beyond the lobby but solemn too.

‘Is it a testimonial for somebody important?’

He shook his head. ‘You shouldn’t ask so many questions, Rosie.’

It was the first time that he had used her name. It seemed more intimate and romantic than any of the standard terms of endearment that tabbed the end of his conversations, the ‘dears’ and ‘darlings’ that were so devoid of sentiment that they sounded like insults. Now he had called her by her name and had recognised her right to an identity. She felt the heat go out of her and, pleased and flattered, gave him a cheesy smile.

He shook his head again, took her arm and led her two or three steps away from the doorway. He glanced bleakly up the street and then, squinting a little, down the long empty stretch that ended at the river.

On the far bank the lights of Anderston and the Finnieston docks glimmered in the dank haze and Rosie watched a little tug or puffer carve across the plane of the Clyde, silent as a phantom.

‘Mr O’Hara?’

‘What? What now, Rosie, for Christ’s sake?’

‘Did you know my daddy?’

*   *   *

Whatever might be said against Lizzie Conway nobody could ever accuse her of laziness. She’d always been a demon for hard work. Her detractors might argue that she’d never held on to a job for long and that her progress in the labour market had been erratic at best.

They might have said that if she’d been less voluble in sticking up for her rights she might have made something of herself. What that ‘something’ might be was left unspecified, for somehow familiar comforting homilies didn’t apply to a woman like Lizzie Conway who had clambered out of poverty with three young children and an insupportable burden of debt hanging round her neck.

If it hadn’t been for the children and the fact that she needed a permanent address from which to apply – unsuccessfully – for a war widow’s pension, she would simply have vanished into the blue. That, at least, was the fairytale Lizzie had put about, the lie that her ailing mother and spinster sister had been persuaded to swallow.

No one had wanted to believe that indomitable, bull-in-a-china-shop Lizzie would be stupid enough to stay on in the Gorbals simply to await the return of a husband who, if he wasn’t actually rotting in a field in Flanders, certainly didn’t intend to hot-foot it back to Glasgow.

The debt with which Frank had saddled her had committed her to sixty hours a week grafting at a machine in Gerber’s factory or cleaning for the Corporation Tramways Department, among other employments. Hard work had turned out to be the stuff of life for Lizzie, though. Hopelessness, exhaustion and despair were held at bay not just by strength of will but by devotion to her daughters and a steely determination to see them, and everyone else for whom she felt responsible, fare better than she had done.

For four years now she’d been employed by the Public Health Department and worked ten-hour days in the laundry of the Sanitary Wash-house at Balmain Park where bedding and body clothing from the victims of infectious diseases were labelled, disinfected, washed, dried and returned, irrespective of whether the poor patient died or recovered.

Sometimes Lizzie plied the rakes in the disinfecting tanks. Sometimes she took her turn rinsing frail items at stone wash-tubs. But usually she was put to labelling in the room next door to the main hall where the noise of the dash wheels and the incessant clack of the carpet-beating machine were so wearing that she would come home half deaf and would have to use Rosie’s special syringe to ease the ringing in her ears.

None the less, Lizzie was proud to be part of a procedure that had all but rid the city of typhus and cholera and that had diphtheria, phthisis and scarlet fever well on the run; proud of the fact that all the goods and chattels hauled in for cleansing in the morning were always returned before midnight. Property, after all, was property.

The Public Health authorities weren’t thieves; which was more than could be said for Frank Conway, her dear departed husband, who had been a thief born and bred and who, if he hadn’t vanished in the smoke of battle somewhere north of Baupaume, would probably have wound up floating face down in the Clyde or, if luck had been on his side, serving a twenty-year stretch in Barlinnie.

She still thought of Frank from time to time.

Memories of good times as well as bad would steal upon her as she settled her head on the pillow or, more often, cat-napped in the chair by the fire.

She imagined that she could hear his voice, the persuasive, arrogant murmur that had made every daft dream he chose to peddle seem practical.

She recalled how he’d looked the first time she’d clapped eyes on him, just before he went to work for the Eye-tie. All glammed up in a trilby, hand-sewn boots and an embroidered waistcoat. Black curls bobbing. More Italian in appearance than any of old Carlo Manone’s mob, though Frank was the errant son of a dirt farmer from Armagh, and as Irish as the pigs of Docherty.

She had loved him and hated him in equal measure. Though he had never raised his hand to her in the six years they were married he’d been callous in other ways. The hand-sewn boots and embroidered waistcoat had been no more real and lasting than his declarations of undying passion; mere trophies of a successful housebreaking, pawned before the marriage was three weeks old.

Even although Frank was a staunch Protestant, worry about his unsuitability had done for Lizzie’s father, so her mother claimed. The truth was that Charlie McKerlie had chalked up more hours in Brady’s public house than any man in the barony and had died right there at the bar, a pickled egg in one hand, a glass of whisky in the other.

Naturally it had been left to Frank to scrape up the money to bury the old bugger, with black horses, black plumes, and a cortège half a mile long with free booze at the end of it. Lizzie’s mother had declared herself too ill to face the rigours of a funeral service but had recovered sufficiently to be carried downstairs and placed in the open carriage that Frank had hired from Carlo Manone and had ridden in style to the wake in the Orange Halls, acknowledging condolences with a wave of her gloved hand.

On that Saturday evening, however, Lizzie wasn’t thinking of Frank Conway, or of times past.

She sprawled in the battered armchair by the fire, head on a cushion, garters unloosened and legs stuck out, not quite asleep and not quite awake, mulling over the pilgrimage that she must make to Dominic Manone’s house, and the manoeuvres that would follow; not a plan yet, nothing so ordered as a plan, but the nucleus of one, the first foetal stirrings of a plan to shake the dust of the Gorbals from her feet once and for all.

She heard a key scratch in the Chubb lock, and opened one eye.

She waited for the babble that would signal that Polly and Babs had returned from window-shopping in town; or – Lizzie opened both eyes – it could be Rosie back from Molliston Street.

Rosie was never clumsy, never noisy. She could slip into the house quiet as a mouse when she wanted to.

She might not even enter the kitchen at all but go straight into the bedroom to peel off her Institute skirt and jacket, brush them, hang them up on the wire and, if she wasn’t in a mood for conversation, would lie on the floor, switch on the wireless and, with her better ear – the left – pressed tightly against the set, scan the dial for dance-band music.

‘Mammy?’

‘Yes, dear.’

In spite of the daft hat and blazer Rosie no longer resembled a child.

She had the same air of precocity that Polly had developed soon after she went to work as an office junior in the Burgh Hall, a job that she had secured through the intervention of the Italian whose influence, it seemed, was everywhere. He had got Babs her job too, clerking with Central Warehouse Company. But Lizzie doubted if even Mr Manone would be able to find work for Rosie, not with her disability.

‘Mammy?’

‘What? What’s wrong?’

She resisted an urge to lunge from the armchair and demand to be told what her youngest had been up to and why she was so flushed. She remained where she was, head against the cushion, and squeezed her knees together to relieve the cramp that had suddenly affected her stomach.

Rosie shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

Lizzie raised herself on an elbow, faced her daughter squarely and said loudly, ‘You did not lose the money, did you?’

‘I gave Alex the money,’ Rosie answered.

‘Did he say somethin’ to upset you?’

Rosie shook her head again.

At that moment Lizzie realised that her youngest wasn’t going to tell her the truth, no matter what.

Cramp tightened its grip. She didn’t dare thrust herself out of the armchair. If she did she would surely grab Rosie by the shoulders and shake her like an old doormat. She had seldom struck any of the girls in temper, not even when things were at their worst.

Rosie’s eyes widened.

Feigned innocence, Lizzie thought.

Something had happened. Something to do with O’Hara. By God, she promised herself, if that wee bastard has laid a finger on my Rosie I’ll cut his damned ears off, aye, and not just his damned ears either.

Rosie said, ‘What’s for tea?’

Automatically Lizzie made a swimming motion.

‘Fish,’ said Rosie. ‘Lovely. What kind of fish, Mammy?’

Never mind the bloody fish, Lizzie thought. Tell me what’s brought that flush to your cheek. Tell me what’s upset you. Don’t shut me out, Rosie. Please, don’t shut me out.

‘Cod,’ she said aloud. ‘Just cod.’

*   *   *

The baked cod had been devoured and, since it was Saturday, one slice of pineapple cake each. Then the girls had whipped through the washing-up. As soon as the last plate had been racked and the tablecloth brushed and put away, though, there had been the usual free-for-all with Babs and Polly squabbling over make-up and fighting to be first to grab the curling tongs from the gas ring.

Then they were off, breezing away, chirruping to Rosie and blowing kisses to Mammy as they dived for the door, leaving behind a clean kitchen, a breathless silence and the cloying odour of face powder.

Lizzie was always surprised to find herself alone; not quite alone, of course, for Rosie was still with her, lying low in the bedroom.

It had been twenty years, near enough, since Lizzie had gone on the randan on a Saturday night. Back in the old days it had been dances at the Orange Halls. Concerts. Variety shows. Plays and pantomimes under the spluttering carbon-arc lamps of the Princess Theatre. Great days. Wonderful times.

Her mother had girned at her precocity, her father had grumbled that she was never at home. Her sister Janet, who’d never had any sort of life, had put on a prim, acid-drop expression and warned her that if she didn’t mend her ways she would be damned and go to hell.

Janet had been dead right. She had gone to hell. They’d all gone to hell one way or another soon after the war got under way.

Now, in just eighteen months she would be forty years old. She was still presentable in appearance but the years had laid their mark on her in subtle ways and, like many ‘busy’ people, she was afraid of being left alone.

She slumped in the chair by the fire, listening to the tick-tock-tick of the little metal clock on the mantelshelf, and to the silence within the house. She had no inclination to lift a newspaper or read a book or go into the bedroom and listen to the wireless. She had never acquired the habit of leisure. And she wouldn’t be at ease for long.

On Saturday nights she was committed to trudging a half-mile to the backlands tenement in Laurieston where her mother and sister lived; to help Janet lift the old woman from her chair, untangle her from her clothes, sponge her, dry her, put on her nightgown and heave her up into the wall-bed, while her mother moaned at their clumsiness and Janet apologised, endlessly.

Lizzie got to her feet, gave herself a shake and, telling herself not to be daft, went into the lobby to find her coat and hat.

God, what was happening to her? Now she had nothing much to worry about she worried about every little thing.

Forcing on a cheery smile, she pushed open the door of the bedroom.

The room was lit by the glow of the gas fire that Rosie, without permission, had turned on.

The drab curtain that screened the street had not been closed and a faint, wan glow from a lamp outside penetrated the glass. The broad bed in which the girls slept together filled the alcove, its heavy cotton bedspread unruffled. A battered old wardrobe with broken hinges almost barred access and the room seemed so compressed that Rosie, on the floor, was almost invisible.

She lay with legs drawn up, an arm folded across her breast.

The Mullard wireless set, the family’s pride and joy, stood mute upon the chest of drawers but the second-hand gramophone that Polly had bought last Christmas was placed on the floor by Rosie’s head.

Music played softly, so softly that Lizzie could barely hear it.

She stepped forward and peered down at her youngest who, chin cradled on her fist, was suspended over the turntable, her left ear a half-inch from the sound-box on the end of the gramophone’s metallic arm.

Rosie’s eyes were closed. Caught up in the sentimental ballad, she was oblivious to her mother’s presence.

‘One Alone,’ Lizzie murmured. ‘Dear God!’ then, shaking her head, left Rosie to her love songs and slipped out of the house to go up to Laurieston and tuck her arthritic old bitch of a mother into bed for the night.