Seven
Ellen hustled Maddy along the pavement. “Let’s get a cab and go back to my place.”
“What did you say your name was?” Maddy had taken a liking to this young woman. She seemed strong and sensible.
“Ellen Drew.”
“All right then, Ellen – where are you taking me?” Maddy limped along beside her, cold, bedraggled and bleeding.
“I live in Bethnal Green – in the East End. It’s not too far.” The younger girl flagged down a taxi. “Once we get home, we’ll have a cup of tea, fix you up, and sort out what to do.” As the cab drew to a halt, she helped Maddy in before climbing in beside her. “Bethnal Green please, mate,” she instructed the cabbie. “Drop us off at the corner of Wilmot Street.”
Safely installed in the cab, Maddy took a sideways glance at her companion. She had been wrong about her, she thought. When she overheard her and Drayton talking in the alley, Maddy had believed the girl to be naive and innocent. Now, having seen how she took charge of the situation, she realized that there was more to the girl than she had previously thought.
A few minutes later, on arriving at their destination, the cabbie stopped exactly where Ellen had instructed. “That’ll be three pounds, if you please.”
“I’ll have to give you an IOU,” Ellen admitted. “Neither of us have got a penny to our names. You see, we had to leave in a hurry and all our stuff is back in Soho.”
Realizing the awkward situation they were in, Maddy slipped off her watch, and handed it to the driver. “This will more than cover the fare,” she said.
“Look, lady, the fare is three pounds – hard cash and no messing.” From the tone of his voice, the man was ready for trouble. “I don’t work for trinkets.”
Leaning forward so as to see his face, Ellen put on her sweetest smile. “Like I said, we got caught up in a brawl, and left our purses behind. It happens, as I’m sure you understand.”
Straining his neck, he looked from her to Maddy. “Working girls, are you?” He winked.
“If you like,” Ellen enticed him.
Maddy was shocked. “NO!” Tugging at Ellen to come away, she told the cabbie, “We’re not prostitutes! It’s just like she said – we got caught up in a fight, and now we just want to get home.”
He glared at them through the mirror. “You must think I was born yesterday,” he said, and gave a snort. “You’ve only got to look at the state of you to know you’re lying.” Gesturing at Maddy’s torn dress, and Ellen’s tousled hair, he sneered, “Picked up a dodgy punter, did you, girls?”
Maddy touched him on the shoulder. “Please, just look at the watch. It’s worth a lot more than three pounds.”
Something in the timbre of her voice made him examine the watch under the light. He was pleasantly surprised. With a gold and silver plaited strap, it boasted the prettiest diamond in the center of the dial. “Stolen, is it?” He knew enough to realize that the watch was good.
“No way! It’s my own watch.” In a softer voice, Maddy entreated him to look on the back.
He scanned the engraving.
The driver chuckled nastily. “Sugar daddy, was it?”
“If you don’t want it,” Maddy said angrily, “just give it back!”
“Whoa! Whoa! Take it easy.” He began to believe her story. “What’s your name?
“Maddy… Maddy for short.”
“So what’s the inscription on the back?”
Realizing he was testing her, Maddy correctly repeated it.
“Mmm. I still can’t be sure if it’s stolen. I mean, you could have just memorized it.”
“Like I said, it’s my watch, given to me by my father on my sixteenth birthday.” Choked with memories, she could say no more.
“Okay. But if your father gave it to you, why would you want to let it go?”
“Because I pay my debts, that’s why.”
Maddy recalled the very day her father gave her that watch. Less than a year later, he was taken ill and died soon after; the shock of which killed her mother. Being an only child, Maddy had been left to fend for herself.
Unable to afford the rent on their two-bedroomed flat in Kilburn, North London, she had sold the bits of furniture for knockdown prices to a local secondhand shop, and started a series of live-in jobs at West End pubs, clubs and hotels. Her musical career had started very slowly in just these places. She’d be washing up one minute, and performing the next. It had been a long and often lonely journey through life, until she met Alice and fell in love with the monster she had now left behind.
“Get out, the pair of you!” the driver said resignedly.
As they climbed out, so did he. Seeking Maddy’s attention, he handed her the watch. “Here you are, love. I can see this watch means a lot to you.” He had noticed how tearful she was when handing it over. “We’ll forget the fare. You keep the watch, and don’t go offering it to strangers.”
Taken aback when she flung her arms round him and kissed him on the cheek, he simply nodded and hurried back round to the driver’s door. “Silly girls!” He watched the two of them go arm-in-arm down the street. “Let’s hope they learn how to keep out of trouble.”
As he drove past them, he opened his window to offer a few words of advice. “I don’t know what you’ve been up to, the pair of you, but you need to keep your guard up. There are some real bad buggers out there!”
Having sowed his seed of wisdom he moved on to his next fare, leaving Maddy and Ellen to head for the end terrace house, where they climbed the steps, waited while Ellen found the spare key in a secret place on a ledge by the front door, and went inside.
“It’s nothing grand,” Ellen apologized, putting on the lights and setting a match to a gas fire in the cozy back room. “It was my Aunt Dora’s house. She wasn’t short of money, so when she moved abroad, she signed the deeds over to me.”
While she flung off her jacket she explained, “I haven’t seen my dad for three years. He and my mum and I had a falling out and somehow none of us ever had the guts to apologize. You know how it is… things get twisted and nasty, and everybody digs their heels in. But I’m past worrying about it. The sad thing is that Mum died of liver cancer a year or so ago, before we’d made it up. But, you know what, Maddy, I didn’t cry. She and I never saw eye to eye, and Dad always took her side, even when he knew she was in the wrong – which was most of the time.”
“Have you any brothers or sisters?”
“A sister, Sally.”
“Is she younger or older than you?”
“She’s twenty-six – four years older and a great deal wiser than me.” Ellen gave a knowing smile. “A bit selfish too, as I recall.”
“In what way?”
“Well, for a start she never let the arguments upset her, the way I did. Instead she always managed to blame everybody else for her own shortcomings. Rather than try and make things better at home, she began making plans to get away from there. Eventually she went to Spain to live with my aunt. Last I heard, the two of them had gone into the hotel business and were doing very nicely, thank you. Mind you, I think she was jealous of me. I went to stage school and had extra music lessons while she had to go out to work in a boring office.” Ellen gave a chuckle. “I daresay I was a spoiled brat, and if I’d been her, I would have hated me too!”
Maddy grinned, but then asked, “Don’t you miss them?” She would have given anything to have her parents back.
Kicking off her shoes, Ellen fell into the big squashy armchair. “Oh, Sally always kept herself to herself, and Aunt Dora never had much to do with me. In fact, I reckon she only signed this place over to me because she felt guilty, seeing as she had already taken Sally under her wing.”
She fell silent as she thought of it all. “I didn’t know Aunt Dora as well as Sally did, so I don’t really miss her. But if I’m honest, I do miss Sally. I reckon her and me could be friends, now that I’ve grown up a bit. No way do I miss my parents though. My mother was a secret drinker, you see, and as for Dad… well, he’d always idolized her. In his eyes, she could do no wrong. He was either too stupid or too besotted to stand up for himself. And now I gather he’s got himself into a similar situation with a new woman. No. I’m well out of it. I’m lucky enough to have the best grandad in the world, though. He’s my mum’s dad, but I wish in a way
Clambering out of the chair, she gave vent to her curiosity. “What about you, Maddy? Are you still in touch with your family?”
Maddy took a moment to answer; it was still painful to talk about it, especially with a virtual stranger. “My dad got ill when I was seventeen,” she answered softly. “It turned to pneumonia, and he went downhill so fast, it was frightening. He never recovered, and from then on, it was as if Mum had gone with him.”
“In what way?”
Maddy shook her head. “She just never got over it. It was as if her world had come to an end. She gave up her job, hardly ate or slept.”
She remembered it as if it was only yesterday. “Sometimes early in the morning, I would hear her go out of the door, then hours later I’d find her up the churchyard, kneeling on his grave. It was awful, like she was a different person – someone I didn’t know any more.”
Her voice broke. “I tried so hard to help her, stopped going to school and stayed at home to keep her company, but she didn’t want to be helped. She wanted my dad back, nothing else… just my dad.” She paused. “I miss her so much. I miss them both, every day, every minute. It’s like an ache that won’t go away, so if
“Did you talk to her – about your dad, I mean?”
“Time and again I tried, I really did! Sometimes when I heard her sobbing in her bedroom, I’d knock on her door and beg to be let in. But she wouldn’t open the door. In the end, there was nothing anyone could do for her.” She shrugged. “Less than a year later, she followed him. And left me behind.”
“Oh, Maddy… I’m so very sorry.”
Maddy didn’t hear her. She was back there, living it all over again. “The doctors said it was a massive heart attack that killed her, but others said she died of a broken heart. And the more I think about it, the more I believe they were right. It wasn’t her fault – she just couldn’t live without him.”
“Have you any brothers or sisters?”
Maddy wearily shook her head. “My parents married late in life. I was an only child.”
“Are there any aunts and uncles?”
