The Mersey Daughter (Empire Street #3)(37)

Winnie stood in the doorway, leaning on the frame. It was the middle of the morning and Rita wasn’t due at the hospital until the afternoon. Winnie, nevertheless, was unsteady on her feet and her hands shook a little. She seemed distracted.

‘I said, have you seen the corned beef?’ Rita repeated, her patience fraying. ‘It was definitely here before the weekend. I took out three tins – two for the shelves and one for Mrs Mawsdley. She wanted it for her Saturday tea.’

Winnie’s eyes became focused and gleamed with spite. ‘Oh, her. No better than she should be, that one.’

Rita raised her eyebrows at the insult to one of her mother’s friends, but said nothing. At least she seemed to have got Winnie’s attention now. ‘Yes, so that’s how I know there was a box of it here. So where can it have gone?’

Winnie tutted. ‘You want to ask that Ruby. She’s probably gone off with it; she’s not right in the head. Or that Violet woman you think so much of. We don’t know anything about her really – she could be anybody, coming in here. Stealing our stuff.’

‘Honestly, Winnie, what a thing to say.’ Rita wanted to scream in frustration. ‘You know darn well that this shop would have ground to a halt if it wasn’t for Violet. She keeps the place together so you can lie in your bed.’

‘Well, you should be working here, not gallivanting off,’ Winnie protested, going back to her favourite theme of the past eighteen months or so.

‘Hardly gallivanting.’ Rita wiped her hands on her faded cotton printed apron. ‘Right, I can’t spend any more time looking for it. I’ll try again later. Excuse me, I’m going back to the shop.’ She had to brush against Winnie, who was slow to move from the doorway, and caught the unmistakable smell of sherry on the old woman’s breath. Involuntarily she gasped and drew back, it was so unpleasant. She’d suspected for some time that Winnie had been hitting the bottle, but never had she smelt it so strongly.

‘What?’ demanded Winnie belligerently.

Rita turned to face her. ‘You need to go steady on that sherry, Winnie. It’s not even lunchtime.’

‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Winnie insisted, straightening up, but still holding on to the doorframe. ‘Don’t you go spreading rumours about me. I won’t have it.’

As if, thought Rita. What would be the point? Still, she couldn’t help wondering where Winnie was getting the extra money. In the old days she’d have been selling her black-market goods to her specially selected group of customers, but that had all changed now. Or had she found some way of palming off the corned beef in exchange for sherry? Rita shook her head. She was being ridiculous. Violet would have noticed something if that had been the case. There had to be another explanation.

‘Why don’t you go back upstairs and have a nice wash, Winnie?’ she suggested, unable to stop herself wrinkling her nose.

Winnie glared at her malevolently through red-veined eyes. ‘Don’t you imply anything about me, young lady,’ she hissed. ‘I shall go upstairs, but only because I don’t care to be in the same room as you. That’s all.’ She tottered unsteadily along the dim corridor and headed up the steps.

Rita stared after her for a moment but then forced her mind back to the job in hand, restocking the shelves so that Violet wouldn’t have to. Violet would forget to record which items had been moved from the storeroom to the shop itself, and then the whole system would break down. It was precarious enough at the best of times as more and more goods became hard to obtain, but Rita made an effort to keep some semblance of order. They needed to keep the shop going; her nurse’s wages weren’t enough to get by on. There had still been no word from Charlie, let alone any money, and now it looked as if they had Winnie’s sherry habit to support as well.

A noise from the living quarters made her turn. Ruby was there, smiling shyly. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Rita? I can boil the kettle.’

Rita smiled back. ‘I’d love one.’ It was only recently that Ruby had plucked up the courage to do this, even though it was coming up for six months since she’d arrived. Rita hadn’t wanted to let her near the kettle or anything hot to begin with, as she seemed completely incapable of working out what was dangerous and what wasn’t. It was a slow process, getting her to adjust to normal life – or as normal as it got these days. For the hundredth time Rita wondered what Ruby’s existence had been like before she came here. Now she nodded encouragingly as the young woman brought through a tray with a teapot, two cups and saucers and a small jug of milk.

‘There you are,’ she said seriously, setting them on the counter. ‘See, I know how to do this now.’

Rita grinned in gratitude. ‘And very welcome it is, Ruby. Tell you what. Do you mind standing here behind the counter while I take out the empty cardboard boxes? I’m going to keep them in the back yard until Mam can collect them. She can tear them up and put them on the victory garden compost heap.’

‘What … what if someone comes in?’ Ruby asked nervously.

‘Then you ask them nicely to wait a minute and call me,’ explained Rita. ‘I won’t be a moment.’

Ruby’s face became determined. ‘All right.’

‘Good girl,’ said Rita, thinking that although Ruby was only a few years younger than herself, the age difference seemed much greater. Still, the girl was improving. She would never have agreed to mind the shop until recently. Rita went to the corner where she’d left the boxes, bent to pick them up and pushed through the back door to the tiny courtyard. She’d propped up a makeshift roof of old galvanised metal across the corner of two walls, so that she could stack the cardboard out of the way where it could keep dry until Dolly could fetch it.