Child of the Mersey. Annie Groves

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      Rita breathed a heavy sigh. It was just like Charlie to side with his mother. She couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t feel like an unwelcome visitor under Mrs Kennedy’s roof. Charlie’s father, Mr Kennedy, had died of Spanish flu when Charlie was just a child and he had never known his father. As a result he and his mother seemed joined at the hip. She wondered if the walls of the room really were closing in, or if it was just her over-active imagination.

      ‘I’m sorry, Charlie …’ Rita stretched her hand across the creaking bed and Charlie turned his back to her. They slept in the front room above the shop overlooking Empire Street, the bedroom that had once belonged to Charlie’s parents, and Rita hated it. His mother slept in the next room and the walls were paper-thin.

      ‘Maybe all this overtime you’ve been doing,’ Rita whispered, ‘will take us a step closer to having a home of our own.’

      ‘Shut up, Rita. She will hear you!’ Charlie replied through gritted teeth.

      ‘If we had our own place …’ Rita inched tentative outstretched fingertips across the mattress towards him. However, the tone of his voice stopped her short of actually touching him. She stared at his back, ramrod straight as he sat rigidly on the side of the bed. She knew Charlie had had an unsuccessful journey to his client, and was not in the mood to make love to his wife now. However, that was nothing new.

      ‘I’m tired … It’s work… The threat of war …’ You name it and I’ll use it for an excuse.

      There had been a time when he couldn’t wait to get Rita into bed. Normally he enjoyed a little contest to see if he could get a woman to give herself to him. He’d had his eye on Rita for a while before he’d bedded her, her flame-red hair and flashing eyes, along with her shapely figure; her rounded breasts swelling beneath her clothes. Rita was younger than him by a good few years and she’d had eyes only for that Jack Callaghan. Then when he went off to Belfast or wherever it was he’d gone Charlie had seized his chance. She’d been easier to bed than he thought and her willingness to succumb had surprised him. At the time her passion and hunger had only inflamed his desire for more. But then she told him she was pregnant and he had paid tenfold for his little weakness. Usually, once he caught what he wanted he soon lost interest. He loved the challenge, the chase. But Rita had well and truly caught him out. There was no way he could leave her in the lurch like he could the others before her. His trouble was he had broken the golden rule and brought trouble to his own doorstep. The shame would have killed his mother if their name had been muddied. So he had done the ‘decent thing’. Now he couldn’t bear the sight of Rita. Sometimes his urges would get the better of him when his ‘home visits’ were a little quiet. Then he would take her just how he wanted her.

      That new woman he was bedding near Southport had him by the balls, thought Charlie. She was playing him like a good ’un. Her husband owned a large engineering firm in Bootle and she was his accountant. With the threat of war, it should have been so easy to secure the deal. However, Mrs Smallfield was playing cat and mouse.

      The thrill was certainly in the pursuit, Charlie thought, knowing he would secure the policy – a big one even by his company’s standards. However, Mrs Smallfield wanted more than the promise of security for her husband’s firm in time of war. The woman was insatiable. Except tonight!

      Twenty bloody miles and for what? Nothing! No signature and not even the usual shag. Now Rita was coming over to him, unusually seductive. She was the mother of his children, for Christ’s sake! Charlie shuddered. Perish the thought! It had been a long time. The last time she had been so eager Charlie reckoned he could have been anybody.

      ‘There’s nothing wrong, is there, Charlie?’ Now she was using her feminine charms. He knew her game. She was broody, wanted a gang of kids, like her mother, and all live happily ever after. The thought sickened him.

      ‘Go to sleep,’ he mumbled.

      ‘I don’t know what to do about the children, Charlie.’ Rita lay on her back listening to the late-night revellers coming out of the pub at the bottom of the small street. ‘We had somebody around earlier talking about evacuation.’

      ‘Hardly surprising, Rita. Have you heard the news lately?’

      ‘I want to do what’s best for them, of course I do,’ Rita could feel her heart breaking even now, ‘but they missed you so much when you went on that business trip. I don’t know what they would do if they didn’t have either of us.’

      ‘They’ll be fine, Rita,’ Charlie sighed. That brandy he’d had in the Sailor’s Rest was beginning to take its toll and all he wanted to do was sleep now.

      ‘I don’t think I can let them go, Charlie.’ Rita felt the sting of tears behind her eyes.

      ‘You’ll do as you are told,’ Charlie snapped. ‘It won’t be safe around here and if the authorities say they have to go then they will.’

      Rita flinched at his harsh words. If war did come then there would be many changes around here, and not just in this family. Plenty of marriages kept going only for the sake of the children, Rita knew, and hers was one of them.

      ‘We could move to the countryside. It would be safe there.’

      ‘Don’t be so stupid, woman!’ Charlie was lying on his back now, looking up at the ceiling, his fingers entwined on his chest as Rita listened to the mournful lament of a tugboat out on the river. It sounded exactly the way she felt. ‘There’s not a chance I could move out now.’

      Leave your mother? Unthinkable! Rita did not voice her thoughts. Instead she lay motionless beside him, anxious and despondent. All Rita wanted was a home of their own, where they could raise the children and be normal. How had she ended up like this? In a loveless marriage to a man who preferred the company of his mother to that of his own wife.

      In the strained atmosphere of the battleground their bed had become of late, Rita wondered silently if Charlie had ever loved her. How different things could have been if Jack had been her husband, as it was meant to be. Rita thought back to her earlier encounter with Jack. All Rita wanted was to be a good wife to Charlie but Jack’s presence always threatened to release those pent-up feelings for him that she had tried unsuccessfully to bury. Why did you have to leave me, Jack? she asked herself for the millionth time.

      Charlie always blamed her for forcing him to marry her because she was pregnant. Now Rita blamed herself too. If only she could turn back the clock. But no, she reminded herself, she loved both of her children though the circumstances of their conception were so different. Living here under this roof with Charlie and his mother was the price she must pay for her mistake. Marry in haste, repent at leisure, isn’t that what they said? It was certainly true in her case. She must make the best of it and do the right thing by the children. Charlie was right on that score. It was up to a woman to make a marriage work, everyone knew that, and if hers wasn’t working it was because she was doing something wrong. Rita vowed to try harder. Sometimes Charlie did want to make love to her, and then it was different, though there didn’t seem to be much love involved either.

      A creak on the landing had Rita turning to the door. She knew Mrs Kennedy was not averse to holding a glass to the wall and earwigging their private conversations.

      ‘Get some sleep. We have to be up early tomorrow,’ Charlie said, his eyes closed.

      ‘I had hoped you would have taken the night off, we could have asked your mum to mind the kids and gone to the cinema,’ she couldn’t help saying.

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