The Four Streets by Nadine Dorries Page A

blow, but Alice even had a plan as to how to cope with Nellie. Week by week, she eased herself a little more into Jerry’s life and each week made it a little harder for him to manage without her help. Without his even realizing it, Jerry was slowly becoming dependent upon Alice.
    Alice was as cunning as she was cold. She paid her second visit almost a month after the first and then the next three weeks later. Each time she came with something delicious to leave behind and, by the third visit, she had begun to help with little things, like the ironing, or making a pie, with food she had taken from the hotel kitchen. This food was divided out amongst staff who worked at the hotel. For the lower grades, it was the leftovers from the table service; but for the more senior staff, it was a cut from the butcher’s and a share from the fresh fruit and veg delivery.
    Alice had never previously taken any, but now she pulled rank. She brought fresh beef and chicken to Jerry’s house and, having taken lessons from the hotel chef, could cook a decent stew. The chef made her the odd pie with buttery hand-rolled puff pastry and steaming gravy, which, delivered in a wicker basket wrapped up in a tea towel, lasted Jerry a few days. In return, Alice supplied the kitchen staff with bedding, blankets and pillows. The hotel trade was doing well in Liverpool and everyone had their cut.
    After the first six months, Jerry would arrive home some nights to find Alice in the kitchen cooking a meal. She always left straight away, insisting she didn’t want to encroach upon his time. This made him feel bad and he implored her to stay and eat with him. He had never invited her to the house, but she quickly worked out that the back door was never locked and took the daring step one day to let herself in.
    For Jerry, the pleasure of coming home to a clean house, with the range lit and a meal cooked, quickly surpassed his shock at finding a near stranger in his kitchen.
    One day, when Jerry and Tommy were sitting on the dock wall having a ciggie break after unloading a hull, they began to talk about Alice.
    ‘She is a strange thing, this Alice,’ Jerry said to Tommy. ‘She seems to like helping out and I can’t work out what she wants in return because she won’t let me pay her nowt.’
    Eejit, thought Tommy, but kept his thoughts to himself. He wasn’t going to start a row with his best mate. He also wasn’t going to repeat to Maura what Jerry had just said, because she would kick off. Instead, Tommy made a few enquiries of his own.
    ‘Was she a friend of Bernadette, then?’ he asked, as subtly as a brick. ‘It’s just that I was wondering, like, why I never saw her before Bernadette passed away and, the thing is, I don’t remember her from the wedding, either.’
    ‘She was nursing her sick aunt in Macclesfield,’ said Jerry, who had already asked this question of Alice during one of their first meetings. He had tried to place her in his mind and tried to remember meeting her. He couldn’t. It was a mystery. He knew the name, he had heard Bernadette mention an Alice, but in what context he had no recollection. But he didn’t have time to dwell on it and, anyway, she was obviously just kind and trying to help.
    ‘I do feel a bit uncomfortable, so I do, just sometimes,’ said Jerry. ‘I mean, what would Bernadette say? But, Tommy, I swear to God, it’s nothing like that, I never so much as touched her or had a thought like that cross me mind. Anyway, as soon as I gets in, she leaves.’
    ‘Aye,’ said Tommy, nodding. Maura had mentioned that. ‘You know what I think, Jerry? I think she’s broody and it’s all about the babby. She has none of her own and I reckon she’s hanging around ’cause she has a nature for Nellie. Not having had a baby of their own by the time they are twenty-one does strange things to a woman’s brain, so it does, and the more time goes on the worse it gets. I don’t know how Bernadette stayed so