Chapter Three

Whatever faith Lizzie Conway had once possessed had been lost long ago. She couldn’t say for sure just when she’d grown disillusioned with the platitudes dispensed by old Mr Wylie, minister of St Margaret’s Church in the Calcutta Road, or when his weary promises of a better day tomorrow had grown stale.

One thing was for sure: she no longer subscribed to a gospel of exalted poverty or the retribution that the Socialist preachers called down upon the heads of the unworthy – by which they meant the capitalist swine who had industry and commerce sewn into their pockets and who cared not a fig for the plight of the common man provided their annual dividends kept rolling in.

For Lizzie, as for many Glaswegians, religion had become a matter of racial and social divisions too deep to fathom yet too shallow to explain. Slogans painted on walls and hoardings, the public communiqués of the city’s twisted zealots, were a constant reminder that not all wars were economic and that historical differences were just as enduring as the class struggle itself. Orangemen marched, Catholics trotted off to mass, Jews got on with business and bothered no one. Out in the streets young men formed gangs. Bully Boys fought with Tongs and Tongs with Neds and they all, or nearly all, queued up together at the Labour Exchange when Fairfield’s shipyard, Dixon’s Blazes or the Kingston Iron Works paid off another two or three hundred men.

She lived, did Lizzie, in a neighbourhood where rage, ignorance and fear bubbled just beneath the surface, and a hunger march or a Jewish picnic or one of the great sprawling gang fights that happened after football matches all began to seem like part of the same event, an event, as far as Lizzie could make out, that had no relevance to pulpit preaching or priestly consolations. She was a Protestant. She was in work. She kept her nose and her house clean. She loved her children and tended to the welfare of her elderly mother. She planned for the future, and paid for the past. That was all that really mattered. That was life in the here-and-now. The hereafter could take care of itself.

Once in a blue moon, though, she would put on her Sunday best and catch a tram along the Paisley Road to visit a man who some folk south of the river regarded as a sort of a god.

His name was Dominic Manone. He was the second son of an immigrant who had come to Glasgow thirty years ago from a village near Genoa. The first son, Carlo, had died, along with one hundred and thirty thousand of his countrymen, fighting the Austrians at a place called Monfalcone in the early summer of 1917. The other boys, Dominic included, had been young enough to be spared the war. Soon after the Armistice old Carlo Manone had taken most of the family away, God knew where, leaving only Dominic in residence in the tall house in Manor Park Avenue with an aunt and uncle to look after him.

Little more than a boy then, young Dominic had been round-faced, smooth-skinned and sallow and looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. He had the uncle behind him, though, Uncle Guido, and eight or ten henchmen of various persuasions, mainly Scots and Irish, to handle the business, legal and otherwise. Over the next few years young Dominic had learned how to run the family’s affairs and had brought a strange sort of order to the untameable fraternity of hooligans and thugs who ran wild about his territory.

His territory, and his influence, seemed boundless, though few honest, hard-working citizens had ever heard of him. He put in an appearance now and then at Comunità meetings but did not show face at any of the religious ceremonies that graced the Italian calendar. Not only did he come from the north, he was, by all accounts, anti-clerical in his views, more Communist than Catholic and, worst of all, he refused to favour Italians when it came to dishing out employment and preferred to take on an Irishman or Scot to some solemn, big-eyed contadino from back in the old country.

In whole or in part, the Manones owned two restaurants, four cafés, an ice-cream factory, a warehouse, a firm that imported religious statuary and another that manufactured crockery.

Dominic Manone’s other sources of income were less obvious and even more lucrative. Through agents he ran much of the off-course bookmaking south of the river. Purchased and resold certain pieces of jewellery, plus antiques and occasional objets d’art. Financed speculative excursions into the acquisition of large quantities of booze or hard currency or, indeed, anything that could be sold on before the coppers could trace it. He was also in a position to guarantee that this public house or that corner shop would remain unmolested by the Neds or the Bully Boys or some other pack of vandals to whom destruction was an end in itself. For this service he charged modest fees, collected on a regular basis by the likes of Alex O’Hara or little Tommy Bonnar.

If you wanted anything from Dominic you didn’t approach him directly and you most certainly did not send him a letter. You ‘had a word’ with Alex O’Hara or Tony Lombard who were usually to be found hanging around the Ferryhead Rowing Club. There were other go-betweens too, including mean little Tommy Bonnar with his pinched bone-white face and graveyard cough.

Lizzie did not have to pass messages down the line and wait for an answer to return by the same unreliable route. She had Dominic Manone’s ear whenever she wanted it, though she was careful not to abuse the privilege. However affable Dominic might appear if and when you encountered him, he was a force, a quite deadly force, to be reckoned with.

Lizzie was nervous as she walked along Belville Road and turned into the top of Manor Park Avenue. She felt like a fish out of water in the select neighbourhood, though it was no longer the apogee of upper-crust ambition to own one of the villas in the leafy streets off Belville Road. Progress and the passage of time had moved the frontier south and west, and for all their stateliness there was already a faintly neglected air to the houses about the park.

Lizzie was the brightest object on the horizon. She wasn’t wilfully gaudy. She just preferred bright colours and loose-fitting clothes. Nothing expensive, not even the ‘vagabond’ hat. She was adept and imaginative with needle and thread, however, and could conjure something almost fashionable out of cast-offs by adding a half belt or trimming down on buttons.

She turned into the gate of Elvanfoot; the villas here still had names, not postal numbers. Stone posts, an unlocked wrought-iron gate, crunchy red gravel, borders of newly turned black earth, no flowers.

Lizzie approached the front door and, glancing surreptitiously into the window, saw a standard lamp lit in the big front parlour, a fire in the grate and Dominic Manone himself propped in a leather chair reading a newspaper.

She sucked in a deep breath and rang the doorbell.

Uncle Guido opened the door. He knew Lizzie by sight and did not have to enquire what she wanted at that hour of a Sunday morning.

Guido Manone was as different from his nephew as chalk is from cheese. He was tall, so tall that he had developed a little carpenter’s stoop that served to press his long, horsey chin into his chest. He seemed to be all face and hands, features that were disproportionately large compared with his dainty feet and stick-like build. He did not smile but he did bow. In his heyday he had been quite a ladies’ man and, even in his sixties, much of this courtliness remained.

‘I – I’ve c-come to see Mr Manone,’ Lizzie stammered. ‘I – I wonder if this is a sort of convenient time.’ Guido Manone stepped back and, with a sweep of his large hand, invited her in.

If there were servants in the house then they were not in evidence. Perhaps, Lizzie thought, they were all at chapel.

She followed Uncle Guido across a broad expanse of carpet to an oak-panelled door. The house had always struck her as gloomy, more like a museum than a dwelling. There were all sorts of strange smells in the atmosphere, spicy smells like cinnamon and clove and a waft of cigar smoke to add a hint of luxury.

Uncle Guido rapped upon the door, opened it and ushered Lizzie into the room she thought of as the parlour. Some parlour! You could have fitted four tenement kitchens into it and still have had room to spare. Massive marble fireplace. Old furniture. Oil paintings of saints and half-clad women on the walls. By the fireplace, standing, was young Dominic Manone. He wore a spotless white shirt, dark waistcoat and matching trousers; polished black shoes, not slippers, as if even at home on a Sunday morning a formal code had to be observed.

Lizzie was used to cocky little dandies with primrose socks, polka-dot bow ties and soft felt hats, the ‘chancer’ element who had run the rackets in Frank’s day. They were dreary pretenders compared to Dominic Manone.

His solemn, olive-tinted face and black unsurprised eyebrows, so straight that they might have been inked in by a draughtsman, were daunting and appealing at one and the same time.

‘What is it you want?’ he asked in a slightly lisping accent that owed more to Glasgow than Genoa. ‘Do you want coffee, or will I send for tea?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, thank you, Mr Manone. I won’t be stoppin’ long. I just want a word with you about – about the matter between us.’

‘What matter is that?’ he said.

On a polished side table stood a china coffee pot, cup and saucer, a cigarette box and a tub of the long, blue-headed matches that you only saw in the very best restaurants. Dominic Manone did not offer Lizzie a cigarette or even a seat. He perched on the arm of the Georgian wing chair by the fire.

He looked as strong and compact as a street fighter, one of the bare-knuckle breed, not a cowardly razor king. If he had not been who he was he could have been a legend in the ring. Except that the Italians, like the Jews, seldom took part in the fierce gang fights that spilled blood for no purpose.

If he had been a fist fighter though, Lizzie thought, she would have bet on him every time.

She said, ‘I need to know when I’ll be paid up.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I do.’

Chin tucked in, head cocked, he glanced at her from the tops of his eyes. ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you like your new house?’

‘Who told you about my new house?’ Lizzie said, then added, ‘Anyway, it isn’t a new house. It’s just bigger than the last place.’

‘Is it the girls, your daughters, you worry about?’

‘What sort of a mother would I be if I didn’t worry about my children? Please, Mr Manone, tell me when I’ll be all paid up.’

‘Never,’ he said, softly. ‘You haven’t even cleared the interest on our eight hundred pounds. What was your first repayment – five shillings? Then ten shillings. Now it’s twenty-five a week. We’ve always been accommodating, have we not? Never so much did we ask that you would be left penniless.’ He shook his head. ‘Find six hundred fins – no, find five hundred – and we’ll call it square.’

‘Where am I goin’ to get five hundred pounds?’

‘Do you see the position I’m in, Lizzie?’ Dominic said. ‘How can I let you off what you owe when it’s so much? What would the other people who owe me money think? That Dominic Manone had gone soft in the head?’

‘I didn’t steal your damned money,’ Lizzie said.

‘Where did it go then? Where is my eight hundred pounds?’

‘Frank spent it,’ Lizzie said. ‘Or took it with him. How do I know? I never saw a flamin’ penny of it.’

‘We have only your word on that.’

‘Dear God!’ Lizzie said. ‘Do you think I’d have been livin’ hand to mouth for the past ten years if I’d had eight hundred quid tucked away? I’d have been off out of here. Off like a shot.’

‘Would you have taken your mama with you, and your sister too?’

‘Meanin’ if I’d left them behind you’d have had them carved up?’ Lizzie said. ‘For God’s sake, what kind of a man are you?’

‘You must not be so dramatic, Lizzie.’ He got up, fetched a chair from a corner, placed it behind her. ‘Haven’t I done what I could for you? Have I not been helpful to your family?’

‘You have,’ Lizzie admitted. ‘You found the girls jobs when there was no work about. I’m grateful for that but…’

‘What more do you need from me?’

‘Supposin’,’ Lizzie said, ‘I want to get married again?’

Surprised, he pursed his lips. ‘You don’t need my blessing for that.’

‘How can I saddle a new husband with my last husband’s debt?’ Lizzie said. ‘That wouldn’t be fair, would it?’

‘He isn’t a rich man, this potential husband?’

‘Far from it.’

‘Is he from this part of the world?’ Dominic asked.

‘West End.’

‘Have you told him anything about our arrangement?’

‘’Course I bloody haven’t.’

‘Do you wish me to talk with him? Explain the situation.’

‘I can do that myself – if and when I have to.’

‘Oh, I think that you will have to.’ Dominic paused. ‘Unless…’

‘Unless what?’ said Lizzie, looking up.

‘Your girls are working? Could they not take over your debt?’

‘What?’ Lizzie yelled. ‘Land my girls with my debt. I’d die first. I’d let you cut my throat before I’d allow my daughters fall into your…’

She tried to take control of herself. It didn’t do to raise your voice to Dominic Manone, to treat him as if he were any Tom, Dick or Harry. His suggestion had been totally unexpected. It hadn’t occurred to her that Frank Conway’s debt might pass down through the generations like some disease of the blood. Cramp gripped her, making her wince.

Oddly enough, for a man in his position Dominic wasn’t used to watching people suffer. Also, he had considerable sympathy for Lizzie Conway, more sympathy for her than for any other person, man or woman, with whom he did business. It wasn’t her fault that she had been caught in the poverty trap. It wasn’t her greed or stupidity that had put the albatross around her neck. She had inherited a crippling debt.

If Lizzie Conway thought that he could write it off, however, just eliminate it from the books at the stroke of a pen, she was much mistaken. No matter how much sympathy he had for her, no matter how much he admired her struggle to make something of herself, he couldn’t go against nature. Everything had to be paid for in kind or in blood. That was his father’s law, the law of nations. To flout it, even once, would be opening the door to anarchy.

He didn’t know Lizzie Conway very well. He had never clapped eyes on her daughters, except that one time three or four years ago when he’d driven down to Rutherglen Road to watch the arrival of the hunger marchers, to experience at first hand the palpable and stimulating rage that dripped like sweat from the legions of dockers, steel-workers, miners and shipwrights who came tramping down the high road, heading, so they said, for London.

Lizzie Conway had been stationed on the pavement at the end of the parkway, her arms about her girls, holding them tightly to her as if to prevent them being sucked into the floodtide of protest.

He had been hidden in the rear seat of the long-bodied Alfa Romeo with Uncle Guido and Tony Lombard and some skirt that Tony had brought along. He had looked out and had seen Frank Conway’s widow, not waving, not cheering, showing none of the wild solidarity that activated the women around her. She’d had her arms around her girls, grown though they were, and he, Carlo Manone’s son, had envied them not just their unity but their closeness, their resistance to the anarchic fever that was sweeping through the streets.

‘I’m not going to do your girls any harm,’ he said.

‘If you do,’ Lizzie said, ‘I’ll…’

‘What? Murder me?’ He uttered a little huh-huh of laughter, not cynical but warm, as if the idea of being done in by this common, unglamorous woman was somehow amusing. ‘You wouldn’t murder me, Lizzie Conway. You wouldn’t know how.’ Then he was serious again. ‘Who is this guy who wants to marry you? What’s his name?’

‘He’s not one of your crowd.’

‘Has he asked you?’

‘Not yet; but he will.’

‘Do you love him?’

‘He’s a good man,’ Lizzie said. ‘He’ll look after me.’

‘What about your daughters? Will he look after them too?’

‘He’ll take us all out of here.’

‘I thought you liked living in the Gorbals.’

‘I hate living in the Gorbals. It’s no place for young girls.’

‘They are not young girls. They are young women.’

‘I don’t want them marryin’ any of your boys.’

Again the huh-huh of amusement. ‘They could do worse.’

‘Could they? Worse than Alex O’Hara?’

Dominic pushed himself to his feet. He adjusted his shirt cuffs and stared from the window at the plane trees that lofted their branches over the hedges.

‘I can’t help you,’ he said. ‘I can’t rub out the debt. If you want to get married then you’ll have to tell your husband the truth; or find some way to raise the wind behind his back.’

‘How much would buy me out once and for all?’

‘I told you five hundred.’

‘All right,’ Lizzie said.

Dominic turned from his contemplation of the trees. ‘You will pay it?’

‘Yes.’

He came forward, placed his hands on the chair and leaned towards her. His breath had the same smell as the house, dry and spicy, but not unpleasant. He touched her cheek, a soft little slap to make her raise her head and look at him. ‘You’ve found the money, haven’t you? The money Frank stole?’

‘I haven’t found the money. I’ve no idea where it is, or what Frank—’

‘Don’t lie to me, Lizzie Conway.’

‘After ten bloody years – twelve bloody years – what chance have I got of findin’ anythin’?’ Lizzie said. ‘If you ask me I don’t think there is any money. I think Frank blewed it before he joined up.’

‘Eight hundred fins? Come on!’

Lizzie drew in a breath. She touched Dominic’s wrist with her fingertip and lightly pushed his hand away from the proximity of her face. Even that, she realised, was a daring thing to do.

He stepped back.

Lizzie got to her feet.

She brushed at her skirt, fiddled with the collar of her coat and straightened her hat before she looked up again. ‘No, Mr Manone, I’m not goin’ to pull a wad of banknotes from my purse. I don’t have the money.’

‘So why did you come here this morning?’

‘To find out how much you’d settle for.’

‘Well,’ Dominic said, ‘now you know.’

‘Aye,’ Lizzie said. ‘Now I know.’

*   *   *

In the last tenement, and the tenement before that, all four Conways had been crowded into a single room. There had been a bed set into the wall and another had been dragged down out of a cupboard late every night and cranked back up early every morning. Before that, in the basement in the old weavers’ row near the railway, there had been no bed at all and Mammy and the girls had slept all together on a straw-filled palliasse on a damp stone floor, among rat-dirt and cockroaches. Mercifully, Rosie couldn’t remember that far back.

In the winter of 1920 Rosie had contracted a fever that had all but destroyed her hearing. The cause of the fever and just how close Rosie had come to death were matters that Lizzie refused to discuss with anyone except Mr Feldman. Only Polly could recall those dreadful days and nights when Rosie had been racked by crisis after crisis, when Mammy, solid, reliable, unfazeable Mammy, had wept with frustration when the doctor had refused to treat Rosie without payment in advance.

Finally Mammy had lifted Rosie from the mattress, had wrapped her in a blanket and had gone running out into icy darkness, leaving Polly – wide awake and scared, so scared – in charge of Babs. It had been mid-morning before Mammy had returned, haggard and hollow-eyed. Without Rosie. Rosie had been kept at the Victoria Infirmary where Mammy had carried her and where some kindly register had taken her in, in spite of the fact that Mammy had no insurance and couldn’t pay the fees.

It had been a fortnight before Rosie had been returned to them, frail, fractious, and permanently deaf. And Mammy had never been quite the same afterwards, never easy, never relaxed.

She had taken night work on top of her day shifts. Polly had often been kept away from school to look after her ailing sister. Before the summer was out, though, they were up and off, quitting the damp, rat-infested basement for a tenement kitchen that was at least dry and there had been real beds to sleep in, enough coal to keep the place warm and just enough food on the table to nourish them. They had survived thus until Polly was old enough to leave school and find work and then, with an extra wage, however small, coming into the house, things had become marginally easier.

Bits and pieces of second-hand furniture had begun to fill up the spaces, ornaments to appear on the shelves, and rugs and blankets and cushions, purchased from market stalls, had created a cosy clutter. After Babs had been found work too there had even been enough to buy clothes that fitted, shoes that didn’t let in the wet and an occasional luxury like the wireless or the gramophone.

Only Polly was old enough to realise just how much her mother had sacrificed to bring them up.

When Rosie grumbled or Babs moaned it was Polly, not Mammy, who would snap at them or give them a good hard slap and tell them to sit up and count their blessings.

Only Polly really understood her mother well enough to be sensitive to the changes that were taking place, those prickly little undercurrents of restlessness and brooding silences. So it was Polly who spotted the first white hairs, the first wrinkles, the first trace of night sweats and that – that heaviness that had begun to affect her mother. In themselves the signs meant little. She, Lizzie, had been ‘down’ before; a kidney infection had all but floored her for the best part of six weeks. But this was different, quite different.

‘Are you feeling all right?’

‘I’m feelin’ fine.’

‘You don’t look quite yourself.’

‘I’m fine, Polly. Stop botherin’ me.’

They were sitting up together about half past nine o’clock, not an unusual hour for the family to retire on Sunday night. In the bedroom across the little hall Babs and Rosie would still be fiddling with the knobs of the wireless set in the hope of discovering dance music or something more cheerful than solemn-voiced Englishmen discussing politics or religion. Mammy was already in bed, Polly seated on a chair close by, her feet stretched out and resting on the quilt.

‘I mean,’ Polly said, ‘if there was somethin’ wrong, you’d tell me, right?’

Lizzie put down the tattered magazine, Sea Breezes, that she’d pinched from Tosh, the van driver at the laundry.

‘Polly, for God’s sake,’ she said, ‘nothin’s wrong with me.’

A tubby lamp on a shelf overhead shed light upon them. There were no other lights in the kitchen but the fire still glowed in the grate, the uncurtained window above the sink caught the faint gaseous glow of arc-lamps from the shunting yard to the east, and patched on to the night sky were the lights of backland tenements.

The little metal clock ticked busily in the awkward silence.

Lizzie peered at her daughter, frowning.

Polly wore a cotton nightgown, had a shawl over her shoulders and six or eight little paper curlers screwed into her brown hair. Somehow she felt disadvantaged by the curlers. She pretended to be engrossed in the copy of Breathless Surrender that Mammy had also pinched from van driver McIntosh.

‘Are you tellin’ me I look ill?’ Lizzie said.

‘No, you don’t look ill.’

‘Hoi.’ Lizzie nudged her daughter with a hefty elbow. ‘Look at me, Poll?’

Polly spared her mother a darting glance. ‘What?’

‘You tell me. You started it.’

Polly sighed. ‘You’re just not yourself these days. Are you worried about something?’

‘I’m always worried about somethin’.’

‘I mean, particularly.’ Polly hesitated. ‘Has it started?’

‘Has what started?’

‘You know what I mean – the change?’

‘God, I wish things would change.’

‘The change,’ said Polly. ‘The time of life change.’

‘Oh, that! No, though there are signs it mayn’t be far away.’

Polly put Breathless Surrender to one side. ‘Isn’t it early?’

‘It started with Gran McKerlie soon after I was born.’

‘Gran was always sick,’ Polly said. ‘What about Auntie Janet?’

‘God knows!’ Mammy said. ‘Janet never talks about these things.’

‘Is that because she’s still a virgin?’

‘Polly!’

‘Well – she is, isn’t she?’

‘Probably,’ Lizzie said, warily.

‘Is the change worse for virgins?’

‘I doubt,’ Mammy said, ‘if you’ll ever have to worry about that.’

‘Thanks very much,’ Polly said. ‘I hope you’re not implying—’

Mammy patted her arm. ‘I know you’d never do anythin’ stupid.’

Polly was not so sure, and prudently changed the subject.

‘Did you go to talk to Mr Manone this morning?’

‘Aye.’

‘Thought as much,’ Polly said. ‘About our Rosie?’

‘Rosie?’ Mammy appeared puzzled. ‘What does Mr Manone have to do with our Rosie?’

‘I thought you might be trying to borrow money again. For Rosie, I mean. Or,’ Polly added, hastily, ‘that you were asking him to find her a job.’

‘Time enough for that come June, when she leaves the Institute,’ Mammy said. ‘Anyway, Mr Feldman tells me he might be able to find somethin’ suited to her abilities. She can type forty words a minute, you know.’

‘Yeah,’ Polly said, ‘but she’ll never be able to take dictation or answer a telephone.’ She paused. ‘What did you go to see Manone about?’

Mammy lay back against the pillow and looked up at the stained lace fringe of the miniature lampshade on the shelf above her head. ‘I needed to find out how much we still owe him.’

‘How much?’

‘Eight hundred pounds.’

‘Huh!’ Polly said. ‘You should’ve saved yourself the tram fare, Mam. I could have told you that Manone’s never gonna let us off the hook. It’s the way sharks like him work. You borrow something, not even very much, and wind up paying off the bloody interest for the rest of your life.’ She inched closer to the bed and rested a hand against her mother’s arm. ‘I suppose the smarmy sod told you it was a debt of honour.’

‘Oh, I knew that already. I’ve known it for years.’

‘It’s why he looks out for us,’ Polly said. ‘He looks after us the way you’d look after a herd of cows. He finds us jobs just so’s he can milk us for money every month.’

‘He says he’ll settle for five.’

Polly drew back, shook her head. ‘He knows you’ll never be able to rake up five hundred. Anyhow he doesn’t want you to pay him off. That’s the last thing he wants. He just wants to keep the tap dripping.’

‘I’m sick of it,’ Mammy admitted.

‘I know you are,’ said Polly.

‘What’ll happen when you get married?’

‘I’ve no intention of getting married,’ Polly said.

‘I don’t want you to wind up like your Auntie Janet.’

‘Don’t even jest,’ said Polly.

‘See,’ Mammy said, ‘that’s the trouble. I’d like you to get married. I’d like to see all of you married.’ Polly had heard this song before. ‘I’m frightened you get carried away by the wrong sort of chap. Don’t tell me it can’t happen. I’ve seen it happen. One minute you’re nice sensible girls, next minute you’re swept off your feet by some Ned in a fancy suit who rattles a bit of cash in his pocket.’

‘Well’ – Polly regretted it before the words were properly out of her mouth – ‘well, if this mythical guy’s rattling money in his pocket and he’s mad enough to want to drag one of us to the altar he might even be willing to square your debt with Dominic Manone.’

‘No.’

‘Clean the slate,’ said Polly, lamely.

‘Never.’

Mammy heaved herself from the pillows. For an instant it seemed that she had been gripped by cramp again. She placed her chin on her knees and stared, scowling, at the pattern on the quilt. Polly saw the muscles of her mother’s forearms flex, the contour of shoulder and back change as she stiffened her spine. There was nothing old, nothing aged about Mammy now, nothing in the pose to indicate that her determination was waning.

‘I’ll not hand it down to you, not to any of you,’ she said. ‘Frank Conway was my man. I took him on for all the wrong reasons an’ I’ve had to pay the price ever since. But not you, Poll, or your sisters. Once you’re all safely out of here then I’ll do what I have to do.’

‘And what’s that?’ Polly asked.

‘Go and live with Gran and Janet, I suppose.’

‘Is that the best you can dream up?’

‘Or marry.’ Mammy rubbed her cheek against her shoulder. ‘Now wouldn’t that be a turn-up, dearest, if your mammy went an’ got married first.’

‘Who is he?’ Polly said. ‘Hell’s bells, Mam, it’s not yon van driver, is it?’

‘McIntosh? Nah, nah. He’s already got a wife. Besides, he’s too old for a sparky young thing like me.’

‘What are you talkin’ about?’ Polly sat bolt upright. Stared at her mother. Blinked. Said, ‘Good God, you do have some guy in mind. You’ve no intention of going to stay with Gran and Janet. Who is he? Does he fancy you?’

‘I think he does – but he doesn’t know it yet.’

‘Who?’ It was Polly’s turn to nudge. ‘Who? Who? Who?’

‘Mr Peabody.’

‘The factor’s man?’ Polly’s mouth opened and closed in astonishment. ‘Oh, Mammy, you can’t be serious? I mean, I know you said you fancied him but I thought it was a joke.’

‘No, it’s no joke,’ Mammy admitted. ‘I haven’t done anythin’ about it yet – and perhaps I never will – but let’s just say I wouldn’t be averse to marryin’ Bernard Peabody, or someone very like him.’

Polly swallowed, thickly. Her eyes grew hot. She felt less bewildered than betrayed by her mother’s admission, as if the whole affair were cut and dried and the shabby little agent were already waiting in the wings to take her place in Mammy’s affections. She stammered, ‘Are – are you really in love with him?’

‘Don’t be so bloody daft,’ said Mammy and, with a fruity little chuckle, rolled on to her side and drew the blankets firmly over her head.