‘I . . . I hope you see your girl next week.’
‘I hope so an’ all. I . . . I’d like you to meet her. You’d like her, I know you’d like her, and what’s more, well, being you you’d bring her out, ’cos she’s quiet. You have that habit, you know, of bringing people out, making people talk. You got me talkin’ the night all right about Newcastle.’
Janie stood for a moment blinking up at him and slightly embarrassed and affected by the tenderness of this lanky, kindly young fellow. His simple talking was having the same effect on her as Rory’s gentle touch had done. She felt near tears, she had the silly desire to lean forward and kiss him on the cheek just like a sister might. But that was daft, there was no such thing as sisterly kisses. That was another thing her grannie had said and she believed her. There were mothers’ kisses and lovers’ kisses but no sisterly kisses, not between a man and woman who weren’t related anyway . . . Yet the master kissed his sister-in-law, she had seen him. Eeh! what was she standing here for? She said in a rush, ‘Good night, John George. And thanks again, I’ll see you next Sunday. Ta- rah.’
‘Ta-rah, Janie.’
She hurried up the side path, but before opening the kitchen door she glanced back towards the gate and saw the dim outline of his figure silhouetted against the lamplight, and she waved to it; and he waved back; then she went into the house . . .
Mrs Tyler, the cook, turned from her seat before the fire, looked at Janie, then looked at the clock above the mantelpiece before saying, ‘You’ve just made it.’
‘There’s three minutes to go yet.’ Her retort was perky.
She wasn’t very fond of Mrs Tyler. She had only been cook in the Buckhams’ household for eighteen months but from the first she had acted as if she had grown up with the family. And what was more, Janie knew she was jealous of her own standing with the master and mistress.
The cook never said anything outright to her but she would talk at her through Bessie Rice, the housemaid, making asides such as ‘Some people take advantage of good nature, they don’t know their place. Don’t you ever get like that, Bessie now. In Lady Beckett’s household, where I did my trainin’, the nursemaid might have her quarters up on the attic floor but below stairs she was considered bottom cellar steps. Of course, a governess was different. They were educated like. Why, in Lady Beckett’s the still-room maid sat well above the nursemaid.’
On the occasion when this particular remark was made, Janie had had more than enough of Lady Beckett for one day and so, walking out of the kitchen, she remarked to no one in particular, ‘Lady Betty’s backside !’
Of course she should never have said such a thing and she regretted it as soon as she was out of the door, and before she had reached the nursery she knew that the cook was knocking on the parlour door asking to speak to the mistress. Ten minutes later the mistress was up in the nursery looking terribly, terribly hurt as she said, ‘Janie, I’m surprised at what the cook has been telling me. You must not use such expressions, because they may become a habit. Now just imagine what would happen if you said something like that in front of the children.’ She had gulped and stood speechless before the young woman who had shown her nothing but kindness and when the mistress had gone she had laid her head in her arms on the table and cried her heart out until young Master David had started to cry with her, and then Margaret, and lastly the baby.
She looked back on that day as the most miserable in her life, and yet when she went to bed that night she had had to bury her head in the pillow to smother her laughter. Having earlier decided that feeling as she did she’d get no rest, she had gone downstairs to apologize to the mistress and to tell her that never again would she use such an expression in her house, and that she need not have any fear that the children’s minds would ever be sullied by one word that she would utter.
She had reached the main landing when she was stopped by the sound of smothered laughter coming from the mistress’s bedroom. The door was ajar and she could hear the master saying, ‘Stop it. Stop it, Alicia, I can’t hear you . . . what did she say?’
She had become still and stiff within an arm’s length of the door as her mistress’s voice came to her spluttering with laughter the while she made an effort to repeat slowly: ‘She . . . said . . . you . . . can . . . kiss . . . Lady . . . Beckett’s . . . backside.’
‘She didn’t!‘
The laughter was joined now, high, spluttering; it was the kind of laughter that one heard in the Connors’ kitchen when Lizzie said something funny.
‘Well done, Waggett!’
There was more laughter, then the master’s voice again saying, ‘I can’t stand Tyler. You want to get rid of her.’
‘Oh, she’s a good cook; I can’t do that, David. And Janie mustn’t be allowed to say things like that. But oh, I don’t know how I kept my face straight.’
She had backed slowly towards the stairs, and when she reached the nursery floor her face split into one wide amazed grin; yet her mind was saying indignantly, ‘I didn’t say that. It’s just like cook to stretch things. But eeh! the master, I’ve never heard him laugh like that afore. Nor the missis. They sounded like a young couple.’
It wasn’t until she was in bed that she thought to herself, Well, I suppose they are a young couple. Yet at the same time it was strange to her to realize that people of their class could laugh together, spluttering laughter; for they always acted so very correct in front of other folk, even when the sister came. But then the sister was married to a man who had a cousin with a title, a sir, or a lord, or something, and, of course, she wouldn’t expect them to act in any way but refinedly. But, anyway, they had laughed, and the mistress actually repeated what she herself had said, only, of course, with a bit added on by the cook.
And that night she had told herself yet once again that she liked her master and mistress, she did, she did, and she would do anything for them. And as she had recalled their laughter the bubbling had grown inside her, and to stop an hysterical outburst she had turned and pressed her face tightly into the pillow. And her last thought before going to sleep had been, ‘I’ll have them roaring in the kitchen next Sunday. And she had.
2
It was the Saturday before Christmas; the sky lay low over the town and the masts of the ships were lost in grey mist.
Rory shivered as he walked up the church bank and entered Jarrow. He passed the row of whitewashed cottages, then went on towards the main thoroughfare of Ellison Street. He hated this walk; he hated Saturday mornings; Saturday mornings meant Pilbey Street and Saltbank Row. Pilbey Street was bad enough but the Row was worse.
He had six calls in Pilbey Street and fifteen in the Row, and as always when he entered the street he steeled himself, put on a grim expression and squared his shoulders, while at the same time thinking, Old Kean and those other landlords he represents should be lynched for daring to ask rent for these places.
For four years now he had collected the rents in these two streets. In the ordinary way he should have collected them on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday because on these days he came this way collecting, and right on into Hebburn, but you couldn’t get a penny out of anybody in Pilbey Street or the Row on any other day but a Saturday morning. And you were lucky if you managed to get anything then; it was only fear of the bums that made them tip up.
He lifted the iron knocker and rapped on the paint-cracked knobless door. There was a noise of children either fighting or playing coming from behind it, and after a few minutes it was opened and three pairs of eyes from three filthy faces peered up at him. All had running noses, all had scabs around their mouths and styes on their eyes. The eldest, about five, said in the voice of an adult, ‘Aw, the rent man.’ Then scrambling away through the room with the others following him, he shouted, ‘The rent man, Ma! ’Tis the rent man, Ma!’
‘Tell the bugger I’m not in.’
The woman’s voice came clearly to Rory and when the child came back and, looking up at him, said, ‘She’s not in,’ Rory looked down on the child and as if addressing an adult said, Tell her the bugger wants the rent, and somethin’ off the back, nr else it’s the bums Monday.’
The child gazed at him for a moment longer before once more scrambling away through the room, and when his thin high voice came back to him, saying, ‘He says, the bugger wants the rent,’ Rory closed his eyes, bowed his head and pressed his hand over his mouth, knowing that it would be fatal to let a smile appear on his face with the two pairs of eyes surveying him. If he once cracked a smile in this street he’d never get a penny.
It was almost three minutes later when the woman stood before him. She had a black shawl crossed over
