The Four Streets Saga Read online

  ‘So, she’s up to no good, that one,’ said Peggy.

  ‘I’ve never seen a woman smiling, coming out of a house of death before,’ said Mrs Keating.

  ‘Aye, looks like she has her eye set on being the new Bernadette if you ask me, that high and mighty one,’ said Mrs O’Prey, as she dropped her ciggie on the pavement and stubbed it out with the toe of her slipper, scorching the sole with a reek of burning rubber.

  Nothing would get past the women on the street. They might not have been endowed with academic brilliance or good looks, standing there in their housewife’s uniform of curlers, headscarves, wraparound aprons and baggy cardigans, but their emotional intelligence was as sharp as a new razor.

  ‘Aye, so it does,’ said Peggy, as Mrs O’Prey’s words sank in. Peggy was always the last to catch on. ‘My God, the brass neck of the woman. She’s as brazen as yer like and, mark my words, I bet we will see her back here soon enough, Jaysus, would yer so believe it not?’

  It was often hard to understand what Peggy was on about, even for her neighbours, but they all got the gist and never questioned her.

  They carried on watching Alice, walking with a pert step back up the street towards the bus stop, and gave each other a knowing nod and a smile. Peggy put her hands on her hips and began to wiggle, imitating Alice’s walk behind her back. They all began to laugh. Peggy always made them laugh.

  On the bus back to the hotel, Alice knew she was going to have to play a long game. A thrill of excitement shot through her stomach as she thought about what she had set out to do. The first step had been easier than she had imagined it would be, although her nerve had almost failed her as she walked down the street towards Jerry’s house, carrying the fruit cake she had paid the chef in the hotel to make. All of her brave thoughts over the last few days had deserted her. The plans she had made in her head did not seem so attractive in the cold light of day as she attempted to put them into action. It was the children on the street staring at her that finally drove her the last few steps to Jerry’s door.

  She noticed that front doors on the street were beginning to open and women were gathering in twos and threes, folding their arms and staring at her, as bold as brass. They intimidated her and left her in no doubt that it was her they were talking about. Her heart was pounding in her chest and her throat was so dry it had all but closed up. It had taken all her courage to knock on the door.

  ‘The nerve of me,’ she said quietly to herself, as she took her seat on the bus. She almost laughed out loud and looked around to see if anyone had overheard.

  There was no doubt in her mind what she wanted, but it wouldn’t be fitting for anyone to guess that yet. She wanted Jerry. It wasn’t that crazy. The feelings she had nurtured for him over the years were so intense, he would surely feel and share them once he got to know her.

  For years, Alice had been obsessed with Jerry. The man who had raised his cap to her. Who had looked into her eyes as he greeted her. The man who had once smiled at her in a way that made her stomach churn like it never had before or since. It was only Jerry who had entered Alice’s thoughts over the last few years. Bernadette had been barred. Jerry was important; he mattered, Bernadette did not.

  Alice had first met Bernadette when, as a new chambermaid fresh from the bogs, Bernadette had reported for her first day at the hotel. She had immediately caught Alice’s attention. Not only was she not scared stiff and whimpering, she was positively bursting with energy, had bright shining eyes and was eager to start work.

  Alice managed to remain hostile and distant with the impetuous, bubbly new arrival, who settled into hotel life very quickly.

  Bernadette spoke and interrupted Alice so often, she felt her face burning with anger. However, it was impossible to shut up this girl who, even when chastised for talking, appeared never to take offence. Nothing, not even the worst telling-off Alice had ever given to anyone, using the harshest words, seemed to penetrate her happiness.

  Alice was fascinated by Bernadette. By her hair, her accent, the way she smiled, the blueness of her eyes. She stared at the freckles on Bernadette’s arms, the shape of her teeth, and she was transfixed by every word that came out of her mouth. She felt that if she was an oddity, so was Bernadette, just in a different way. But Alice didn’t bond with Bernadette. She didn’t like her.

  The same couldn’t be said of the young man who met Bernadette at the end of each shift every day. That young man did stir feelings in Alice and she was as obsessed with him as she was by Bernadette, but for very different reasons.

  Alice had never before seen a man kiss a woman the way she saw Bernadette being kissed. It happened by accident, late one night, just as Alice was closing the blind in her attic room at the back of the hotel. She heard Bernadette’s incessant laugh as she turned in to the back gate and watched as, bold as you please, she put her hands on either side of the man’s face and kissed him. And then he kissed her back. Alice held her breath, stunned. She felt a thrill of intense excitement run through her entire body, something she had never experienced before. Rooted to the spot, she stared, open-mouthed, and watched them.

  And this she did from the very same place, on every night Bernadette went out. Alice lived her life through a pane of glass and in secrecy.

  One evening, just as she knew Bernadette was about to leave work to meet her mystery man at the gates, Alice sent her off on an errand whilst she herself slipped outside, under the pretence of dropping a note to the gatekeeper. She wanted to see his face, to look at Bernadette’s man close up. She wanted to hear his voice and get close enough to smell him.

  As she crossed the yard, with her keys jangling against her long black skirt, she tried not to stare, but it was impossible. She suddenly felt stupid in her housekeeper’s long apron. Bernadette’s beau was the most beautiful man she had ever seen.

  He obviously felt her eyes on his face because he turned, delighted, and chuckled, raising his cap in polite, almost extravagant acknowledgment, and shouted, ‘Top of the evening to you!’ as she walked past. It was the nicest, warmest smile she had ever received from anyone.

  She noticed his hair was almost jet black, curly and slightly too long. Alice felt as though she had had an electric shock.

  ‘Good evening,’ she managed to reply primly, but she felt as though she was trying to talk with a mouth stuffed full of knitting.

  He was wearing a long dark overcoat and a sombre checked scarf, but she could see that this made his eyes shine even brighter and show off his face, which was tanned, not pale like her own and that of most of the men who worked at the hotel.

  Alice felt her cheeks burn red and her heart beat fast. The blood rushed to her ears and she couldn’t tell what she was saying to the gatekeeper, who was looking at her oddly. Her heart was pounding and her breath came short from rushing. Her eyes were gleaming at her own audacity. She had done it. She now knew his face. That was all she had wanted. For now.

  Every day that Bernadette worked at the hotel, Alice watched her being met and dropped off by her man. She waited, like a voyeur, to see every goodnight kiss at the back gate. She closed her eyes and imagined it was she, not Bernadette, being kissed by the tall handsome Irishman with the gentle smile and laughing eyes who let his hands roam over her buttocks. It was she, not Bernadette, who lifted those hands off and playfully chastised him.

  One Saturday morning, there was a knock on Alice’s office door, and Bernadette burst in.

  ‘Oh, Alice, I have the most fantastic news!’ she announced, bouncing up and down. Bernadette was totally unaware that Alice didn’t like her. It was not something she had ever experienced before and she didn’t recognize hostility.

  ‘I’m to be married and I would like to give you my week’s notice. I’m to become a lady of leisure,’ she trilled, as she turned round and round on the spot, her arms open wide to include the entire office in her exuberant embrace. ‘Or more likely,’ she enthused, not giving Alice time to answer, ‘a hard-working housewif
e.’

  Her laughter escaped through the open door and bolted off down the staff corridor, where the chambermaids looked up and smiled at each other, already knowing Bernadette’s news.

  Alice felt the blood drain from her face. Jerry was about to exit her life. She would no longer be able to see his face every day and imagine he was meeting and courting her, not Bernadette. She nodded in acknowledgment and told Bernadette she would leave a letter in her pigeon hole with her stamp card and a reference for the following Friday. She didn’t wish her well, because she felt no such goodwill. She couldn’t get her out of the office fast enough. Bernadette was so high on her own happiness, she didn’t even notice.

  From that Friday onwards, Alice never saw Bernadette again, but she never forgot Jerry. She thought of him every single day. When she slept at night, she dreamt of him. Vivid, detailed, dreams. Once she had seen his face and known his voice, he dominated her waking thoughts and, somewhere in her head, she lived in an imaginary world. One where he was collecting her, waiting for her, kissing her. One in which he was hers and whisking her away to a life in a comfortable house, where she could make a world of her own. A life void of Bernadette.

  When years had passed and Alice read the announcement of Bernadette’s death in the Liverpool Echo, she was breathless with excitement. All those dreams seemed suddenly within her reach. Jerry was alone.

  The bus driver approached Alice for the money for her ticket. ‘Lime Street station,’ she said, as she handed over the money without removing her long gloves, of brown kid leather with six buttons. Alice hadn’t bought them; she might have been the housekeeper, but her wages took into account that she was provided with board and food. She certainly couldn’t afford gloves as fancy as this herself. They had been left behind by a guest, placed in Alice’s lost property box and never claimed.

  The bus driver raised his eyebrows. Fingerless knitted mittens were the best he ever saw on a cold day on his bus. Alice saw his look and loved it. Her plan had been developing in her mind by the minute. She wanted Jerry, but not his circumstances. She was not going to live a docker’s life. She wanted better than that. That was what happened to the Irish girls at the hotel. She would have to work on Jerry to leave the four streets and use what little money she had to get them away. Alice had worked amongst guests who were travelling on from the Grand to America. She had overheard their conversations and read the letters and leaflets they had left behind in their hotel bedrooms. Alice was taken with the idea of America. New York sounded like the most amazing place in the world.

  In a few short minutes she had transformed an idea into a certainty.

  The only dent in her pleasure was the unwelcome news that Jerry had been left with a daughter. The wording in the newspaper announcement had repelled her: ‘A beloved baby daughter left with a broken heart.’ Alice loathed children and in Jerry’s kitchen it had taken every ounce of resolve and determination she had to walk over to the basket and make the ridiculous sounds she had heard other women make when they saw a baby. Seeing Jerry’s obvious love for Nellie roused no answering tenderness in Alice; she was more curious as to why a man would want to hold a baby and not look displeased. She knew this was something that made her different from other people, and she must disguise it.

  It was not entirely Alice’s fault that she felt this way. As a child herself, she had been so unloved and neglected that normal emotions were now almost impossible for her. From the age of three, she had known that her parents neither loved nor wanted her. Sitting in the doctor’s surgery, suffering miserably with a nasty case of chickenpox, Alice had looked around at the other children, cuddled on their mothers’ laps, while she shivered on a hard chair by herself. Her mother sat in the chair next to her, staring straight ahead with a rigid back, managing to look at no one, ignoring the reproachful stares of the other women. Alice leant back against the chair, wondering what it would be like to be touched and kissed like the other children. Alice was never touched at all.

  Neither of Alice’s parents had wanted children. From the day she was born neither of them took to her. Her conception had been an ‘accident’. One they had learnt from, because they never had sex again. The consequence of sex, Alice, scarred them for the rest of their married life.

  Alice’s father was a clerk at a solicitor’s in town. The couple were just about comfortable, one and a little bit above poor. Alice’s mother was a hypochondriac who invented a new illness each week, and her father worked hard to pay the doctor’s bills. He was a suppressed, quiet man who accepted his lot in life, did everything he was instructed to do and never complained. Alice sometimes thought he would like to talk to her, that he wanted to be kind, but that he knew it wouldn’t be approved of. Only one female in the house was allowed any attention from her father and it wasn’t Alice.

  As the years passed, Alice became almost invisible. You could walk past her in the street and be totally unaware you had done so, so slight was her presence. Her parents didn’t talk to the neighbours and she had no friends to speak of, because she wasn’t allowed to play with the other kids in the neighbourhood. She spent a great deal of time at her bedroom window, watching as other children wheeled push-bikes in and out of the houses up and down the street, sometimes pointing up to the window and laughing at her if she didn’t move away in time.

  ‘Oi, Miss Havisham,’ shouted the boy from across the street to her, one afternoon when she had spent a particularly long time at the window, ‘come out and play.’ She ducked and hid behind her curtains and didn’t go back to the window for days.

  When she was about seven years old, she saw a small child and her father walking hand in hand past her window. No one had ever held Alice’s hand. She watched intently, unable to look away as the little girl and her father passed by. She stared at their hands, clasped together, at the father striding on ahead laughing, his head bent forward against the wind to prevent his grey trilby hat from blowing away, and the flaps of his long dark grey overcoat kicking out in front as he strode purposefully forwards. Her eyes fixed upon the little girl, giggling, tripping along behind like a balloon bobbing around in the wind, about to break free and take off. She had to resist the urge to run out into the street to follow them and see what they did next.

  What is he doing holding onto her hand? she asked herself. She sat for hours, replaying the image over and over in her mind. No matter how long she pondered, it made no sense to her and added to the confusing questions that were growing in her mind about her life.

  It wasn’t as though she was entirely short of physical contact. The impaired hearing in her left ear was surely due to the fact that whenever she did something wrong, apparently often, her mother hit her with such force across the side of her head that her ear blew up like a cauliflower for well over a week. During this time she couldn’t eat properly or close her jaw fully until the swelling had subsided.

  And that was about it. There was never any talk other than what was essential. No affection. No interest. She could never remember a meal with her parents, although every night it was her job to lay the table and then to clear the dirty dishes away, when her parents signalled to her that they had finished. She ate her bread and dripping each morning in the scullery, alone, whilst her parents sat at the kitchen table. She was never allowed to join them.

  ‘Don’t make any noise when washing up, Alice,’ her mother would bark, as they left the room. When Alice made a noise, she reminded them she was there. Noise pricked their collective guilty conscience.

  One evening when she was fifteen, while she was washing the supper dishes at the kitchen sink, her mother made a rare appearance and picked up a cloth to wipe down the table. Alice knew straight away that something must be wrong and nervously took her hands out of the dishwater.

  ‘Your father has found you a job,’ her mother said to her, without any preamble or niceties. ‘On Monday you will start work as a chambermaid at the Grand hotel in town. You will live in at the hotel and earn your
own keep. You can pack your bag over the weekend.’

  With that, she put down the cloth and left the kitchen. Alice stared at her back as her mother walked out of the door.

  The following Monday, Alice stood at the staff entrance to the Grand with her small suitcase at her feet, watching her father walk away without a backward glance. In her pocket was a bag of barley sugars – the first, and last, sweets her father had ever bought her, perhaps in response to the unspoken distress in her eyes.

  She never saw either of her parents again. Within a year, they were both killed in a tram accident, having never written to her or visited her since the day she left. Alice inherited just enough money to bury them, and their furniture, which the hotel manager kindly allowed her to store in the hotel basement. Alice received the news of their death with composure and dry eyes. She was swamped by a feeling of relief. No one would hit her, ever again. There may have been no money, but she suddenly had possessions and had lost the people who inflicted so much pain upon her. Alice felt rich and, for the first time in her life, moderately content.

  However, this contentment was destined not to last.

  The bus pulled up outside the gates of St Mary’s and through the window, in the graveyard, Alice saw the freshly dug mound of earth laid over Bernadette’s grave like a quilt. It was covered in home-made wreaths and bunches of pink and white flowers. Alice smiled to herself. My turn now, Bernadette, she thought to herself. My turn.

  What happened next was a mystery. There was a wire running along the roof of the bus for people to pull to ring the bell in the driver’s cab, should they want to alight. As the bus pulled away from the church the bell rang, seemingly of its own accord, and the driver slammed his foot on the brake. He thought something must have been very wrong for the bell to ring as he was pulling away. The conductor, standing in the aisle, suddenly lurched forward and his ticket machine slammed into the side of Alice’s head.