Chapter Nine
‘Walk with me to the grocer’s?’ Oliver said, poking his head around the sitting room door. Something was bubbling upon the stove behind him – she could hear it spitting water onto the grate, and then sizzling.
‘It’s a bit late, is it not?’ Ava glanced at the clock upon the mantlepiece and then realized – belatedly – it had not been wound, for it still read a quarter past nine.
‘We’ve got an hour or so before it shuts,’ Oliver said, pulling off his apron and disappearing back into the kitchen.
She heard the clatter of metal on metal as he began to cluster the pans around the stone basin of the sink.
‘Besides, I forgot the potatoes. Can’t very well have scouse without the potatoes. ’
Ava sighed. In truth a walk would do her good, for her thoughts seemed to be marching in circles, and at the centre of them was the dark-haired man from the other night.
There’d been something about him – something slippery, something shifting.
She’d spent her life amongst actors, people who wore one face for the world, and another upon the stage – and she could see that in him, too.
And yet, she couldn’t help but feel she should’ve helped him. Should have been able to help him. Although then she supposed she would be facing another problem altogether … one with dark green eyes.
‘You should have a wife to do those things for you, Oliver,’ called their father from the hallway, the bottom step creaking.
‘Have you been plotting with Mrs Moss again?’ Oliver fired back.
‘She only mentioned her niece twice at breakfast the other day,’ said Ava.
‘Three times,’ said Oliver. ‘I was counting.’
‘All I’m saying is that you won’t be young forever,’ their father muttered, crossing the sitting room in his morning robe and their mother’s slippers. ‘You’re nearing thirty.’
‘I’m twenty-six,’ Oliver said, plucking Ava’s coat as well as his, and throwing it to her. ‘Come on. Before Pa summons Miss Collins with the sheer power of despair alone.’
The walk from their father’s house near the docks to the greengrocers was a pleasant one that took them through Cleveland Square, where the treetops were slowly turning from green to deep, buttercup yellows and smouldering scarlets.
‘Remember when we wanted to live here?’ Ava asked, looking up at the houses that ringed the square – though now the stucco was flaking from most of the walls, and the iron railings circling each house had begun to rust.
‘Ma would never have moved,’ said Oliver. ‘She loved that house.’
‘I am not sure she would love it as much now.’
‘Mmm,’ said Oliver, tucking his arm through hers, and leading her wide of a puddle, a single white feather floating in it. ‘She’d love it even less when we can no longer afford to pay Mrs Moss the rent.’
She looked at her brother, at his cold-bitten face, and the tendrils of brown-blond hair that refused to stay beneath his grey woollen cap. ‘How bad is it?’
‘With both of us out of work? It’s not brilliant. Ma’s savings are almost all gone. And there’s …’ Oliver looked away. ‘There’s something else.’
‘“Something else”?’
Oliver huffed a breath through his teeth. ‘If I tell you,’ he said, ‘you have to promise not to get riled.’
She gave her brother an incredulous look as they turned back onto the main street, and the hum of carriages rattled past them once more. ‘You always say that when you know perfectly well that you’re about to rile me.’
‘Then promise at least to try.’
‘Very well,’ she said, as they waited for a gap to cross the busy thoroughfare of Ranelagh Street.
‘When I broke my arm and had to leave the theatre,’ Oliver began cautiously, ‘Lillian lent me a sum to tide us over. Pa and me. And now I need to pay it back. Which I cannot do, because I’m not working, and I cannot work, because—’ He lifted his broken arm.
‘Which is why I thought perhaps your memory work would be a good solution.’
‘To a problem I did not know we had,’ said Ava, spying a gap in the carriages to drag her brother across the road. ‘You should know better than to let Lillian sink her claws into you,’ she said. ‘What did I tell you before you took the job at the theatre—’
‘She doesn’t have her claws in me,’ muttered Oliver, his pace quickening.
‘She is a snake, Oliver. And all she does is wait for the day she can uncoil, and bite you. No need to make her job easier by living in the tall grass with her.’
She watched Oliver’s expression grow stony as he sidestepped a woman carrying a precarious stack of packages in one hand, and a basket in the other. ‘I wouldn’t have had to borrow money from her if you’d been here. If you’d answered my letters.’
‘You never mentioned you were sore for money,’ Ava countered. ‘Just as you didn’t mention Pa’s …’ She hunted for the right words to describe the maudlin darkness of the house. ‘… Domestic fixtures.’
‘Ava, I am not going to start scribbling down all of our family’s woes for some soul in the postal office to read. You weren’t here to help me, and I had nowhere else to turn.’
Ava clamped her mouth shut at the accusatory note in his tone. ‘I had little other choice,’ she said, with great effort. ‘You know that.’
‘Just like I had no choice but to manage everything that came afterwards. “How’s the theatre without me, Oliver? I hope Miss Lillian isn’t making your life hell, Oliver. She must surely be mad that I’ve upped and left without a word, but I’ll leave you to deal with that, Oliver.”’
Ava’s expression flattened as two ringleted girls raced past, their red-faced governess some paces behind. ‘You were the one who chose to keep working for her after I’d left.’
‘It was my job,’ said Oliver. ‘And I wasn’t going to give it up just because you ran off to Edinburgh.’
‘I didn’t run,’ Ava said, though some of the heat had disappeared now from her voice. ‘I just – I …’
Oliver sighed, reaching with his good hand to rub at his eyebrows. ‘I know,’ he said, the anger draining from him, too. ‘And I’m sorry. Ava, I still feel … I still feel awful about what happened between you and Jem.’
‘Why should you feel awful?’ she said, veering them east to avoid Williamson Square – despite it being the quickest way to the market. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘And it wasn’t yours, either. You know that, don’t you?’
It took everything she had to try and turn from the memory bubbling up in her mind, the expression on Jem’s face, the feeling of something pressing down on her windpipe as he’d said: ‘It’s not that I don’t think we’d be good together, Ava.
I think we’d find a way, you and I. We’d have managed.
But … that’s not all there is to life, is it?
“Managing”? You’d want more than that. I’d want more than that. ’
She pushed the memory away with vicious speed – for she’d never thought they were “managing” together.
She’d thought he’d loved her.
‘Come on,’ she said to Oliver, hooking her arm back through his. ‘At this rate the market will be closed before we get there.’
‘Ava,’ Oliver said, his voice more urgent now. ‘Answer me. You know you did nothing wrong, don’t you?’
Ava looked at her brother, at the concerned expression stitched into the lines across his forehead, the downwards slant of his eyebrows. And she nodded, even though her mind whispered: Of course it was your fault. Who else’s could it be?