As the water lapped around Pearl’s legs she felt the numbing cold shoot up her limbs and into the rest of her body. Her feet were just about frozen and she knew it would not be long before the rest of her body felt the same.
Her mind spun back like the swirling water around her fighting against the turning tide. For a brief moment she was just fourteen years old, picking coal from this very beach, and Maisie was growing in her swelling belly.
She had wanted to tell Maisie about the confusion she had felt on finding out she was pregnant – how she knew that she would be disowned by her family – and shunned by society – not only because she’d had a child out of wedlock, but because of the colour of that child’s skin. Black and white didn’t mix. It wasn’t exactly accepted nowadays, but back then … Didn’t Maisie realise this? She hoped one day she would forgive her and understand that she had done what she had done for love.
The freezing cold North Sea was now lapping around her scuffed knees where she had fallen when she tripped coming out of a pub by the docks.
The sea seemed relatively calm today, and she let her fingers lightly touch the tops of the small ripples of waves.
Then – just as a gust of wind caused her hair to swirl around her tear-stained face – Pearl thought she heard a voice in the distance behind her.
‘Ma!’
Was she hearing things?
She stood stock-still. There it was again.
‘Ma!’
It was Isabelle.
Poor Isabelle. She had such a lovely voice. Had always tried to speak properly. She had been desperate to better herself. Desperate to run away from her upbringing. And who could blame her? How Pearl wished she had been able to love her more. To have been a good mother. But she hadn’t. Not even half good.
Well, at least Isabelle would be better off without her now.
Pearl kept on pushing herself through the water, the waves still small but strong, knocking her a little off balance, causing her to stumble on the rocks and pebbles underfoot.
‘Mother! Stop! For God’s sake, stop!’
This time the voice was not Isabelle’s.
Pearl stopped dead still.
It was Maisie.
She was here.
With Isabelle.
And she was calling to her.
Calling out for her mother.
When Maisie saw her mother against the outline of the blackness that was the North Sea, her whole body flooded with sheer panic.
What had she done?
She had been so stupid. So selfish. She had wanted to make her mother suffer for giving her up. But not like this.
Her mother was walking – or rather wading – towards death. And it was all her fault.
She may have hated her mother all of her life, but she had never wished her dead. Above all, she had never wanted to be the cause of her death.
A huge wash of guilt followed the wave of panic. This poor, pathetic woman wanted to end her life and it was all her fault.
‘Mother! Stop! For God’s sake, stop!’
Maisie shouted as forcefully and as loudly as she could. She tore off her heavy fur coat and tossed it to the ground. As she did so her hat flew off and into the surrounding darkness of the night.
As Maisie ran, pain shot through her as the sharp edges of rocks and pebbles stabbed into the soles of her feet. She slipped on some seaweed-covered stones, but her hands shot out in front of her as she went sprawling on to all fours. When she stood up Pearl had disappeared.
‘No!’ Maisie screamed out into the night’s air, flinging her body forward. Her feet hit shingles and she knew then she was near the water’s edge, but still she couldn’t see anything – only a moving expanse of dark, murky sea.
Tears were running down her face. Her mind flooded with self-recrimination. Why had she been so bloody single-minded? So wrapped up in in her own pain and misery? Wanting everyone to pay for what life had done to her.
Her body shuddered with fear as she frantically stared about her. Willing her eyes to adjust to the darkness. To find her mother. The mother she had spent so long tracking down, and had then so heartlessly flung aside.
Behind her she heard Bel shouting out for her ma. She sounded desperate and Maisie knew that she too could no longer see their mother.
But then, all of sudden, her sister’s tone changed. ‘There!’ Bel screamed out. ‘There!’
Maisie’s eyes scanned from left to right – and then she saw her.
The light from the half-crest of a moon glanced across the glass beading on Pearl’s velvet dress and for a split second it glinted and shone out through the darkness.
Maisie sprinted into the water, swinging her arms to push herself forward as fast as she could. Pearl was not that far away. The darkness of the night had tricked them – its cruel sleight of hand had cloaked their mother from them, making her invisible for a moment. Pearl stood as still as a statue, her face white but dirty with grime and the remnants of old make-up.
‘Maisie.’ Pearl’s voice sounded feeble.
‘Maisie,’ she repeated. Her daughter had no idea just how much her mother loved saying that name out loud.
‘Ma, it’s Maisie and Isabelle. Come here, Ma!’
Maisie knew she just needed to keep her mother engaged. Pearl looked like she wasn’t all there – probably wasn’t, with the amount Maisie could only guess that she’d consumed since she had seen her yesterday evening. Maisie felt the bitter cold water shock every nerve in her body as she stretched towards her mother, whose skinny body was being pushed about by the currents caused by the turning tide.
‘Ma!’ She had almost reached Pearl now, but Maisie could see her mother was about to go under. She looked finished. Pearl locked eyes with Maisie and smiled.
Maisie thought her mother looked content – at peace, almost.
And then, as if the sea itself was swallowing her up, Pearl was gone.
‘No!’ Maisie’s voice bellowed out; her voice so loud even Neptune himself must have heard. She propelled her body forward, forcing her legs through the grey water with the last ounce of energy she had left.
Maisie just reached her mother before she went under. Grabbing hold of Pearl’s bare arms, she pulled her mother back up out of the water, and enveloped her in her own slender arms, hugging her hard.
‘What are you doing? You madwoman,’ Maisie was half laughing, half crying. The relief at having made it to her mother in time was overwhelming.
Since she had been a child she had dreamed of the time when her mother would come and find her, take her in her arms, and cuddle her. As she had grown up that dream had faded, and her hopes of her mother rescuing her from the wretchedness of her life had died. Her heart had hardened and become increasingly embittered.
Now, after all those years, here she was – finally reunited with her mother. And it didn’t matter that she was frozen to the bone, soaking wet, and exhausted, she wanted to stay just as they were, for a moment at least.
As Maisie held her mother tight, she knew the hopes and dreams of her youth could never be resurrected. She had waited all of her life to feel her mother’s arms around her, but she didn’t care that it was she who was now cuddling her mother. Nor did she care that it was she who was rescuing her mother from wretchedness and despair.
None of that mattered.
All that mattered was that she had found her mother.
And that, thank God, she had not lost her again. And this time for good.
The water washed against both their legs, their feet sinking a little into the sand and shingles as they continued to hold each other, Maisie listening to her mother as she repeated her name over and over.
‘Maisie … Maisie …’ Pearl’s voice was unusually soft and fragile. ‘Don’t you think it’s a lovely name, Maisie?’ Pearl asked, and her voice sounded tired but happy.
‘I chose your name, did you know that? I gave you your name. Did Evelina tell you?’
Maisie had no idea what Pearl was talking about, or who Evelina was, but she knew her mother loved her. These past few hours with Bel, out scouring the streets of the east end she’d had time to think and she’d had to admit to herself that she had been wrong. Her mother was not some hateful, heartless woman who had given her away like a child tossing aside a broken doll that was no longer desirable or of any use. She was not some two-dimensional uncaring bitch, but rather a woman who, it would seem, had led a chaotic, drink-addled, messed-up life.
‘Ah, Maisie,’ Pearl kept saying. ‘You were the most perfect little baby ever. I loved you. Really loved you. You must believe me.’ Her body sank into her daughter’s arms.
Maisie held her mother. The water was now only up to their calves, having been drawn back by the receding tide and the pull of the moon.
‘I know,’ Maisie told her. ‘I know.’
Mother and daughter stayed for a short while longer, standing in the half-light of the moon, in the shallow waters of the sea, simply holding each other.
Salty tears trickling down both their faces.
Standing on the beach, Bel shivered in the cold night air. She didn’t think she had felt so exhausted in her entire life, but none of that mattered because they had found their ma. And she was alive.
As she saw Pearl and Maisie wade back on to the beach, she grabbed Maisie’s fur coat that had been flung on to the pebbles and hurried over to them. ‘Bloody Nora. You two are gonna catch your death.’ Bel held the thick fur coat out and Maisie reached out and took it.
Pearl was hunched up, her body shaking and her head down. Maisie put the coat around her mother’s shoulders and then pulled it around her so she was cocooned. Pearl grabbed the lapels of the brown fur and pulled them to her neck.
Bel and Maisie guided their mother across the stones and rocks and on to the grassy embankment.
‘Honestly, Ma,’ Bel said, looking at Maisie and giving her the beginnings of a smile, ‘you’ve pulled some stunts in the past, but this one takes the biscuit.’ As she spoke she pulled her thick woollen scarf off and handed it to Maisie, whose designer dress was dripping wet from the waist down; like her sister, she was looking the worse for wear.
Maisie took the scarf and wrapped it around her neck and across her chest.
By the time they had reached the top of the promenade they were dropping on their feet. Pearl had lapsed into her own world and was saying the odd word which neither Bel nor Maisie could make head nor tail of.
‘Do you think she’s all right?’ Maisie asked.
‘That’s the drink,’ Bel said, ‘but I think we need to get her somewhere warm – and quick.’
‘How far is it back to yours?’ Maisie had no idea where they were. They could have been in Timbuctoo for all she knew.
‘Too far to walk with Ma in this state and you with just that dress on.’ Bel looked around. ‘There’s a pub just up the road called the Blue House,’ she said.
Maisie remembered the blazing fire in the last pub they had been to and felt a surge of energy. She felt for her mother’s elbow through the fur coat and lifted her. Bel did likewise.
‘Come on, then. What we waiting for?’ She spoke across her mother’s bowed head to Bel.
‘Lead the way!’
Much to their relief, the pub was closer than they thought. The instant they got through the front door and the warmth of the bar enveloped them, Maisie felt she was in heaven. She didn’t even mind the usual stares as people clocked the fact that they had a ‘coloured person’ in their midst.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to walk into a pub in my entire life,’ she said to Bel.
Within a few minutes, the landlord had got the three women into the adjourning snug and away from the stares of the locals, who were understandably fascinated by the sight of this odd trio of women who looked like they’d been put through the wringer a few times.
The older woman was clearly the worse for wear – more than a few sheets to the wind – and had not reacted kindly to being denied a brandy, especially as the two younger and very attractive women at that had been more than grateful when they were handed a good measure.
While the landlord’s young son cycled to Tatham Street to let everyone know that Pearl had been found alive and well, but that they needed some warm clothes and a helping hand to get her home, Bel and Maisie started to talk to each other. The relief that they had found Pearl, along with the large brandies they were now drinking, allowed them to be amicable with each other for the first time.
‘How did you know where she was?’ Maisie asked Bel. She looked down at their mother, who was now gently snoring with her head crooked to the side and resting on the back of the leather armchair she had been put in.
Bel told Maisie that one of her mother’s few skills in life was that of making ‘the best fires ever’, and that her mother had told her on countless occasions how she would be sent out as a child to collect bits of sea coal from Hendon beach.
‘When Ma first came to stay with us,’ Bel said, thinking about the day she had just tipped up on the doorstep, suitcase in hand, ‘the only job she seemed able – or was willing – to do in the house, was to stack the fire up every night, ready for the next day. And every time she did it she would tell me how she’d go to Hendon beach as a child and spend hours picking up bits of smooth sea coal and carry them in a sack back home.’
Bel took a large gulp of her brandy. ‘… I’ve heard the story of her coal-picking days so many times I sometimes feel like I was there with her myself!’
The two sisters chuckled. It was the first time they had laughed together.
‘The thing is, she always made out it was a real chore, but I could tell by the way she talked about it that there was a part of her that had enjoyed the hours she’d spent looking for coal – the way she talked about the beach, what it was like in the summer when she would go for a swim, or in the winter when she and all the others down there picking coal would stand and watch the massive waves.
‘Oh, and of course,’ Bel added with a smile playing on her lips, ‘Ma was the champion picker. Always got the best bits of coal. She had – how did she put it … That’s it, “I had a real eagle eye,” she’d tell me – and she would always spot the best and biggest bits before anyone else.’
Maisie listened, feeling more relieved than she had ever done in her entire life, and revelling in the heat from the snug fire and the hot burn of the brandy, even if it was a cheap one, and not one of Lily’s finest.
‘So,’ Bel finished off her drink with a grimace, ‘when you started muttering on about “life back then” and electricity and the like, and we walked into that pub and saw the coal fire … well, it was like the penny dropped. I knew if Rosie’s detective friend was right in thinking that Ma would be heading back to some childhood haunt – then it would be there. Hendon beach.’
‘Well, thank goodness the penny did drop,’ Maisie said, picking up their glasses and standing up to get a refill, ‘otherwise this one here, quite honestly, wouldn’t be here now.’
Maisie knew – as she squeezed around the chair in which her mother was sleeping – if that had been the case, then there would have only been one person to blame, and that was herself.