pregnant.
She at once told Phyllis, who was neither surprised, nor angry. The boys were out, doubtless raising hell, Bessie was at her hospital. The two were alone: they did not have to lower their voices or watch for an opening door.
‘And is the father going to stand by you?
‘He’s white.’
‘Oh, my Lord,’ said Phyllis, and her dismay was not so much for the weight of history she was managing to put into those three syllables, but for much nearer trouble.
‘Oh, Lordy-Lord,’ she said again, with a sigh from her depths. Then she summed up, ‘There’ll be problems.’
‘I don’t want him to know.’
Phyllis Chadwick nodded, accepted this, while she sighed and frowned - brows puckering, lips woeful - knowing what Victoria was in for: the girl herself didn’t. The end of her butterfly time -well, that had to happen, and it had been too short, but Victoria could have no idea how her horizons were going to tighten around her.
‘I can manage,’ said Victoria, and now Phyllis’s face showed some humour that was meant to be seen: Victoria would manage because Phyllis would help her. But the young woman had got further ahead in her thinking than the older woman knew.
‘As a single mum I’ll be entitled to my own place,’ said Victoria. She knew all about it because she had heard it from her aunt and from Phyllis: girls got pregnant because they wanted to escape from their families, most often their mothers.
‘[ hope that is not why you let yourself get careless?’
Careless? Thomas used condoms and she had no idea if he had been careless or not. ‘No. But when I knew, that was when I thought I can have my own place.’
‘I see.’
‘I can work in the music shop till the baby. They like me there’
‘And so I should think, that they like you. You’re such a good girl.’
‘And they said I can go back when the baby’s old enough.’
Phyllis was smiling, but there was something there that made Victoria slip off her chair and crouch beside the older woman like a child needing to be held. Phyllis held her, and Victoria began to cry. What she was crying for Phyllis could not possibly guess: if Edward, if that tall fair kindly boy, had been the father of this child, then Victoria would have told him.
‘We’ll start seeing about your own place,’ said Phyllis. ‘I’ll speak to the housing officers.’
There were waiting lists, but when the baby was three months old Victoria moved into a flat in the same building, four floors up. You could say she had a perfect situation. Phyllis, who would help with the baby, was so close. Bessie, a nurse, would be on hand too. The two boys, growing up fast, tearaways and bad lots, were delighted with this baby, ‘A penny from heaven,’ they said, and promised to babysit and teach her to walk.
When Mary was a year old, Victoria, again a slender pretty young woman, still not quite twenty-one, went back to work. There was a child minder in these buildings, one known to Phyllis. At weekends Victoria took Mary to the park and wheeled her around and played with her and there the two were noticed by a handsome young man, who turned out to be a musician, a singer in a pop group. He thought Victoria with her little girl the prettiest thing he had seen in his life, and said so. Victoria could not resist. Phyllis Chadwick had feared the man who would be Victoria’s doom; the unknown white progenitor of little Mary had turned out not to be him, but she had only to take a look at this one to know the future. Phyllis had told Victoria to hold out for a good man, who would stick; yes, there weren’t many of them around, but Victoria was pretty and clever enough to be worth one. This man, she told Victoria, would be all spice and sugar, but ‘You’ll not get much more out of him than that.’
But Victoria got her way and her man, for she married him and became Mrs Bisley. Now there were real difficulties because he moved in to live with her and the little girl, and there wasn’t room enough, and besides, Victoria got benefits as a single mother, which she now had to forfeit. Sam Bisley was out every night, playing gigs all over London and other cities, he came and went, and while Mary had a father, which was more than most of the other black kids did, she scarcely saw him. And he didn’t see all that much of Victoria either, working at his music seven days a week. Then Victoria was pregnant again and Phyllis mourned. She had not seen the man who had impregnated her with her two hoys since the night the deed was done. ‘Now you’ve done it,’ she told Victoria. ‘Well, we’ll have to manage.’
And was this tragic sympathy really necessary? Yes, Sam Bisley was hardly the perfect husband and father, but she loved him, and knew the little girl did too. And when there was his baby, he’d he around more and … so she reasoned, trying to calm Phyllis.
Her job in the music shop would go, though they valued her. Two small children - no. She would stay at home for a while and be a mother, and then later … she did get money from Sam, if not much. She could manage. Her life had become the juggling act familiar to all young women with small children. She found herself a few hours a week working for Mr Pat and he was pleased to have her: he was getting on. She took one babe to the minder and another to nursery school, looked after other women’s children in return for their helping her, and knew that the real theme of her life was waiting: she waited for Sam, who was always coming back from somewhere. Sometimes he brought friends who had to sleep on the sofa and the floor. She cooked for them and put their clothes into the washing machine with Sam’s and the kids’. She could scarcely remember the free young woman who was a bit of a pet m the music shop, let alone the girl who had had all those glamorous jobs in the West End. But it all went on well enough, she was holding her own, the babies were fine - only they already were not babies, but small children, and Phyllis Chadwick was there, four floors down, always helpful, kind and ready with advice, most of which Victoria did take. And then Phyllis died, just like that. She had a stroke, a bad one. She didn’t linger on, as her grandfather had done. Now Bessie was responsible for the boys, and could not help Victoria as much as she had. Perhaps who missed Phyllis most was Victoria. ‘What’s wrong with you and your long face?’ Sam wanted to know, not unkindly, but he was not a man for the miseries. But he did go to the funeral, and the two little children stood between Victoria and Sam and saw earth thrown down over the woman whom they had called Gran.
Soon after that Sam Bisley was killed in a car crash. He was always on the road to and from somewhere, and he drove - as she had told him often enough - like a madman. She was afraid to drive with him, and when the children were in the car she begged, ‘Drive more slowly - for the kids, even if you won’t for me.’ He was smashed up with a friend, one who had spent the night sometimes, on the sofa, or on the floor, and for whom she had cooked plates of fried eggs and fried bananas and bacon.
