Chrissie's Children Read online

  ‘I’m sure she had a reason.’ Chrissie collected the notes and locked them in her drawer. ‘Whether it was a good one is another matter. Where is this dance hall?’

  When Chrissie left the hotel a few minutes later she found the weather changing to match her mood. The storm clouds were gathering low and black as she drove round to the dance hall. It stood in a neighbourhood of terraced houses and small shops, a shabby red-brick building stained nearly black by soot from the chimneys around it. The double doors were open but blocked by a sandwich board bearing a chalked notice:

  Tony DeVere and the Caballeros

  Tea Dance 3 p.m. 6d.

  The first drops of rain fell, splashing big as florins on the dusty pavement. Chrissie edged past the board to reach the paybox where a man in shirtsleeves and braces sat reading the Sporting Man. She took a sixpence from her purse and pushed it through the hole in the glass. ‘One, please.’

  The man lowered the paper to gape at her. He warned her, ‘It’s only half past two. They won’t be playing till three.’

  ‘Are the band in there?’

  ‘Some o’ them, but . . .’

  ‘Then I’ll go in and wait.’ Chrissie took the small ticket he slid through to her and marched on.

  The hall inside was dim, with curtains drawn over the windows against the last of the sunshine that still leaked around the edges in narrow shafts. There was a light over the stage on which stood a drum kit, piano and four chairs set round a small card table. Three men sat on chairs playing cards. Their heads turned as Chrissie’s high heels tap-tapped across the dance floor.

  She halted below the stage. ‘I’m looking for a friend of mine: Sophie.’ She noticed that the men were all in their thirties or forties and held the cards in hands roughened by manual work.

  One of them said, ‘Sophie Nightingale, you mean?’

  Chrissie swallowed, then, ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Are you in the business an’ all, then? Looking for a job?’

  Chrissie blinked at him. ‘A job?’ Then prevaricating, ‘I might be.’

  ‘You’ll need to sing better than Sophie, and that’ll take some doing. Tony will hang on to her for as long as he can, but he might send you on to somebody else that wants a singer.’

  Chrissie asked again, ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Tony’s having a word with her.’ He jerked a thumb, gesturing towards a door at the back of the stage.

  Chrissie climbed on to the stage, using the steps at the side. In so doing she moved out of the dimness into the light and she saw the men’s faces change. They glanced at each other. As she crossed to the door they watched her, suspicious of this slender woman, now seen to be well dressed and so out of place there. She harked back to the days of her youth and grinned at them. ‘I suppose you’re all working the night shift tonight.’

  They relaxed as she spoke their language, showed she knew the economics of their lives. Their spokesman laughed. ‘Aye, we’re all working the neet. Making a bit extra this afternoon. It’s easier than hewing coal.’

  Chrissie paused at the door, tapped on a scarred panel then shoved it open and walked in. Half of the room formed an office, with a small desk at one side and an old settee with sagging springs on the other. Sophie was seated on the settee with a man old enough to be her father. He was dark and thin, with a pencil line of moustache, his long hair oiled and slicked back from a central parting. His arm was around Sophie’s shoulders and she was holding his free hand in both of hers. As Chrissie burst in on them he shoved up on to his feet, glared at her and demanded, ‘What the hell do you want?’

  Chrissie crooked a beckoning finger at Sophie. ‘Come on.’

  Sophie stood up, smoothing her dress down over her hips, objecting, ‘I don’t want—’

  Chrissie recognised the dress as one of her own and raised her voice over Sophie’s to demand, ‘Come on!’

  Tony took a pace towards her and started, ‘I don’t know who you are but—’

  Chrissie rapped, ‘I’m her mother and I’m here to take her back to school.’

  Tony swung on Sophie. ‘Is that right? This is your mother?’ Then he turned back to Chrissie, the significance of what she had said sinking in. ‘School!’

  Chrissie nodded. ‘That’s right. She’s only sixteen.’

  ‘Good God!’ Tony took a quick shuffling sideways stride away from Sophie. ‘I haven’t touched her,’ he defended himself.

  ‘You’re lucky, then.’ Chrissie reached forward and grabbed Sophie’s arm, hustling her towards the door.

  Sophie tried to resist and pulled back. ‘You don’t understand! I’ve got a job here! A regular job! Tea dances once or twice a week, evening dates Thursday, Friday and Saturday! This is what I want to do!’

  Chrissie refused to enter a tug of war but threatened, ‘You’re coming home with me! Now! And I swear to God I’ll call the police if I have to!’

  That shook Tony DeVere into life. He rammed a hand into the middle of Sophie’s back and told her, ‘You did have a job here but not any more. Get out and take your mother with you.’

  Sophie turned her head, still resisting, and appealed to him, ‘What about all those things you just said about me? How I was one of the best band singers you’d ever heard? And we were going to London and you would fix me up with one of the bands there?’

  Tony winced and his eyes fell before Chrissie’s glare. ‘You can forget all that. Just now you’re more trouble than you’re worth. Now get away to hell out of here.’ He yanked open the door and shoved her out of the office. As Chrissie went to follow her he muttered, ‘Mind you, Mrs Whoever-you-are, that lass of yours does have real talent, a lot of it.’

  Chrissie snapped, ‘You can tell that to your wife. I bet she’d be interested!’

  He glowered after her and hurled low-voiced curses at her retreating back as she ran across the dance floor in pursuit of the fleeing Sophie.

  She caught her daughter at the entrance to the hall, where Sophie was struggling to get through a crowd sheltering from the rain that was falling in torrents now. She didn’t resist when Chrissie seized her arm again and marched her to the waiting car. They did not speak on the drive home. Chrissie was too angry, Sophie too miserable. She walked into the house and up to her room without saying a word.

  Chrissie waited an hour for her anger to subside a little, then went to find Sophie, who had changed into a skirt and blouse of her own. Chrissie’s dress was on a hanger by the door. The gramophone was playing, and Sophie lay on her bed, hands behind her head, sullen.

  Chrissie said, ‘I’ve seen the notes you wrote to cover your absence from school. Are you sorry?’

  ‘I’m sorry I had to do it, not sorry I did it.’

  Chrissie tried to reason with her. ‘I won’t let you waste your life—’

  Sophie broke in, ‘I wouldn’t be wasting it. And it is my life! I’m going to be a singer, no matter what you say. You can stop me now but you can’t keep me here for ever.’ Then she began to cry. Chrissie went to her, comforted her, and both said they loved each other. But still, at the end, Sophie said, ‘I will be a singer.’

  Chrissie left her then and descended the stairs. She sat down on the last of them and cried again.

  In Newcastle Tom, neat in his blue suit, returned to his lodgings after his day’s work to find his landlady sitting on the bottom stairs, her head in her hands. As he entered by the front door she looked up and said weakly, ‘I’m sorry, Tom, but I had a funny turn. Just a touch o’ dizziness and headache. I get it now and again but it goes off. I’ll have to go and see the doctor one o’ these days.’

  But she never did.

  Sophie thought about it for some weeks, but when she finally decided to act she did so in a hurry, before she could lose her nerve and change her mind. It was in August, during the last days of the summer holidays, that she crammed her most precious possessions into a single suitcase. She carried it, tiptoeing, down the stairs while the staff were eating lunch
in the kitchen. Then she lugged it along under the trees that lined the road, changing it from hand to hand to ease its dragging weight.

  When the tram stopped she shoved the case up on to the platform beside the driver, who reached a hand down to take it from her, then she ran around to the passenger entrance at the rear. Getting off in Fawcett Street, she used the side entrance to the station so she could not be seen by her mother in the Ballantyne Hotel.

  She left the suitcase in the station at the left luggage office, then took another tram across the bridge to Monkwearmouth. There she looked for Helen Diaz, only to find strangers in the rooms where Helen had lived. The woman told her, ‘She left an address . . .’ so Sophie crossed the bridge again in yet another tram and asked for Helen at the nurses’ home.

  They fell into each other’s arms. There was no need for apologies. They were friends again and that was sufficient. Then Helen explained how her father had left her and how, lowering her voice, she had used her dead sister’s birth certificate to become a nurse.

  Sophie told her, ‘I’m going away.’

  ‘A holiday, you mean?’ Helen questioned, still smiling.

  ‘For good.’ Sophie was not smiling.

  ‘Oh, no.’ Helen was serious now and listened sadly as Sophie told how she had joined the band as a singer, forged the notes and been found out.

  ‘I know what I want to do. The only way I can do it is to leave home, so I’m going.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Helen shook her head in dismay. ‘It’s a big step. I know I couldn’t have left Dad, in spite of the way he treated me, and he wouldn’t hear of me going into nursing. I just couldn’t.’ Then she remembered something else and asked, ‘What about Peter?’

  ‘I broke it off.’

  ‘How did he take it?’

  ‘He said there were more fish in the sea.’ Sophie added unhappily, ‘But I think he was upset, and you were right, he was more serious than I was.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’ve got to go now.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Promise not to tell Mummy if she asks?’

  ‘All right.’

  So Sophie gave her the address, they embraced once again, and Sophie hurried away. Helen watched her go, feeling the tears come to her eyes. She had found her friend again but immediately lost her.

  Chrissie found the note on the table in the hall when she returned home from the hotel in the evening. It was addressed: ‘Mummy’. It read, ‘I love you and Daddy dearly but I want to run my own life. Don’t worry about me. I’ll write.’

  Chrissie thought, Don’t worry? Good God!

  She ran out to the car and drove down into the town. She was too early at the dance hall again. The man who had been in the paybox was cleaning the entrance with a bucket and a mop. He told her, ‘There’s none o’ the band here yet and won’t be for another half-hour.’

  Chrissie had to wait, sitting in the car, her stomach churning and anger mounting. Thirty minutes later Tony DeVere sauntered along the pavement, an open raincoat over his dinner jacket. In the daylight it was stained and shiny with age. He was whistling cheerfully, but that died away when Chrissie threw open the car door and stepped out in front of him.

  She demanded, ‘Where is she?’

  Tony answered quickly, ‘Not wi’ me.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘If you won’t tell me you can tell the police.’ Chrissie turned back to the car but he reached out a hand to pull at her sleeve. She faced him. ‘Let go of me!’

  The look in her eyes was enough. He snatched back his hand as if he’d burned his fingers. ‘No need for the pollis. I’m telling you the truth. She came to see me a few days ago. I didn’t want anything to do with her but she said she wanted an intro to a band in Newcastle and I gave her one.’ He didn’t say that he had done so to spite Chrissie, but she guessed as much.

  Chrissie drove home, ran up the stairs to Sophie’s room and found it in a state of chaos. It was obvious that she had left in a hurry. Chrissie sifted through the clothes, the books and papers, looked into the drawers and in one of them found the bundle of letters Martha Tate had written to Sophie. Chrissie made a note of the address on the latest and replaced the bundle. Then she tidied the room, working with furious energy, and left it neat as a new pin. She told herself wrily that her old skills had not deserted her.

  Jack came home that evening tired. He was stunned and disbelieving when she gave him the news, then hurt and enraged when it sank in that his daughter on whom he doted had run away. He was all for setting out that night to find her and bring her back but Chrissie would not have that: ‘I’ll go tomorrow, on my own. I think this is something I should do.’ He was finally persuaded. Neither of them slept well.

  Chrissie found the address in Newcastle the next day. It was one in the middle of a long terrace of narrow-fronted houses, separated from the pavement by small gardens. Children played a game of rounders in the middle of the street. They stood back and stared curiously as she drove slowly through. So did a few women who stood in their aprons, curlers in their hair, gossiping at their front doors.

  Chrissie parked the Ford outside the door she wanted, crossed the pavement and put a finger on the bell push. She heard it ringing deep in the house and then there came a shuffling of feet inside and the door opened.

  ‘Aye?’ The woman was fat, wore a soiled apron over a greasy black dress and slippers on her feet. Her watery brown eyes wandered over Chrissie and took in the smart costume, the neat court shoes and kid gloves that marked her out of place there.

  Chrissie asked, ‘I’m looking for Vesta Nightingale. Doesn’t she live here?’

  ‘Oh, aye. Come in.’ The woman turned and waddled back along the passage, feet shuffling in the slippers. She stopped at the foot of the stairs and shouted, ‘Vesta! Vesta! Somebody to see you!’

  A voice came faintly from overhead: ‘What?’

  ‘Somebody to see you!’ The watery eyes wavered to Chrissie again. ‘A lady!’

  ‘Righto, darling.’ There were sounds of movement on the floor above.

  The fat woman stood aside. ‘Go on up.’ Chrissie climbed stairs that creaked under her, conscious of the woman below watching her back, turned at the half-landing and went on to the top. She was out of sight of the woman below now but knew she was still there, listening.

  There were two doors on the landing where she stood. The voice came from behind the nearer: ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Chrissie.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Now the door opened and Martha Tate emerged. She had not bothered to prepare herself for the public, as the visitor was only her daughter. Like the women in the street she wore curlers in her hair. She was fastening a worn, imitation silk négligé, beneath which showed a cotton nightdress. Her face was bare of make-up, the skin pallid and blotchy. ‘I might ha’ known you’d turn up,’ she grumbled. ‘You’d better come in here.’ She led the way to the second door, opened it to let Chrissie through then followed, closing it behind her.

  She folded her arms then. ‘Not that you’re welcome, not after the way you treated me the last time we met, but I’m not talking to you with that fat old cow flapping her ears downstairs. Now, what d’you want? Though I can probably guess.’

  Chrissie had taken in the room in one sweeping glance as she entered. There was a dead fire in the grate and a half-empty bucket of coal standing in the hearth. A table covered with a flowered oilcloth, cracked and peeling in places, stood in the centre of the room, four straight-backed chairs around it. There were two armchairs at one side of the fire, a small couch on the other. All the furniture was old and well worn, as was the linoleum on the floor and the rectangle of carpet before the fire. The window looked out on the street and the net curtains were yellow with age, grubby from the coal fire. Sophie’s suitcase stood by the couch.

  Chrissie thought, Furnished rooms with use of kitchen and the tin bath hanging outside in the yard. Probably ten shillings a
week rent. She said, ‘I want to see Sophie.’

  Martha glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘She’ll be here soon. Said she’d bring something back for our dinners.’

  ‘I don’t want this life for her.’

  Martha smiled, lips tight, then said, ‘Depends what she wants, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Sophie is still only sixteen.’

  ‘That’s old enough in this business. What were you up to when you were sixteen? You weren’t at some posh school, I’ll lay a bet on that.’

  At sixteen Chrissie had been running Lance Morgan’s house for him and helping out in his pub. She thought now that it was not a bad life; she had been happy most of the time. ‘That’s not the point.’

  The front door opened and closed and then they heard feet ascending the stairs. Martha listened, head cocked on one side, still smiling thinly at Chrissie. She called, ‘We’re in here, darling.’

  Sophie entered, paused in the doorway watching her mother and said, ‘I saw the car, knew you were here.’ Her gaze switched to Martha. ‘I got some chops, potatoes and veg.’ She put a loaded brown paper carrier bag on the table and a handful of coins. ‘There’s your change.’

  Martha complained, ‘You should ha’ got some fish and chips and saved me having to cook.’

  ‘I’ll cook them.’ Sophie went on quickly, ‘I’ve got a job.’

  ‘With the band?’

  Sophie shook her head then defended her failure. ‘He has two singers already and he can’t take on another one.’

  ‘So where’s the job?’

  ‘Woolworth’s.’

  ‘That’ll do till Solly finds you something.’ Martha crossed to one of the armchairs and sat down, grinned up at Chrissie. ‘Solly Rosenberg’s my agent. He got me all this work in the clubs when the panto finished. He’ll fix up Sophie, you’ll see.’

  ‘I don’t want her fixed up.’ Chrissie turned on Sophie ‘I’ve come to take you home. Your father is very upset. So am I.’

  Sophie shook her head. ‘I’m not coming. You might force me to go back but you won’t keep me there. I’m going to be a singer.’