And he looked up for the first time into Jo’s face and saw the look that Jo gave him: a look almost—terrible. ‘He come straight home,’ Mrs. Vaughan told Nellie in the pub that night, ‘and—“They’re saying you got money, Mrs. V.,” he says. “If you have, you should stash it away somewhere,” he says, “and let everyone know you’ve done it. Living here on your tod, it isn’t safe for you, people thinking you’re worth robbing.” ’ And he had explained to her how to pay it into the post office so that no one but herself could ever touch it. Only a few quid it was, scrimped and saved for her funeral. ‘I couldn’t a-bear to go into the common grave, not with all them strangers…’
‘Never mind the common grave, it’ll be the common bin for you, if you don’t watch out,’ said Nellie. ‘You and your Mary and Joseph—they come in a car, didn’t they, not on a donkey?’
‘You haven’t got eyes to see. You don’t live with them.’
‘They’ve lived other places before you. Did them other landladies have eyes to see?’
What was the name—Mrs. Mace? Had Mrs. Mace had eyes to see, had she recognised, even before the baby came—? ‘Course not,’ said Nellie, crossly. ‘She chucked ’em out, didn’t she?’
‘No, she never. She was moving out herself to the country, her son or someone needed the flat.’ But if one could have seen Mrs. Mace, consulted with her…‘Don’t you ever visit your last landlady?’ she asked them casually. ‘Does she live too far?’
‘No, not far; but with the baby and all… All the same, Marilyn,’ said Jo, ‘we ought to go some day soon, just to see she’s all right. Take you along,’ he suggested to Mrs. Vaughan. ‘You’d enjoy the drive and it’s a lovely place, all flowers and trees and a little stream.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t half like that. I dare say,’ said Mrs. Vaughan, craftily, ‘she thought a lot of you, that Mrs. Mace?’
‘She was very kind to us,’ said Marilyn. ‘Very kind.’
‘And the baby? She wasn’t, like—shocked?’
‘Shocked? She was thrilled,’ said Jo. And he used an odd expression: ‘Quietly thrilled.’
So she had known. Mrs. Mace had known. The desire grew strong within Mrs. Vaughan’s anxious breast to see Mrs. Mace, to discuss, to question, to talk it all over. With familiarity, with the lessening of the first impact of her own incredulous wonder, it became more difficult to understand that others should not share her faith. ‘I tell you, I see the light shining behind His head!’ She confided it to strangers on buses, to casual acquaintances on their way to the little local shops. They pretended interest and hastily detached themselves. ‘Poor thing—another of them loonies,’ they said with the mirthless sniggers of those who find themselves outside normal experience, beyond their depths. She was becoming notorious, a figure of fun.
The news reached the ears of the landlord, a local man. He came round to the house and afterwards spoke to the boy. ‘I’ve told her—you can’t all go on living in that one little room, it’s not decent.’
‘There’s the shed,’ said Jo. ‘I sleep out in the shed.’
‘You won’t like that for long,’ said the man with a leer.
Billy had seen that look, on the building site. But the boy only said quietly: ‘You couldn’t let us have another room? She says they’re only used for storage.’
‘They’re let—storage or not, no business of mine. For that matter,’ said the man, growing cunning, ‘it’s no business of mine how you live or what you do. Only… Well, three and a kid for the price of one—’
‘I’ll pay extra if that’s it,’ said Jo. ‘I could manage that. It’s only that I can’t find anywhere else, not at the price I could afford.’
‘Just between the two of us, then. Though how you put up with it,’ he said, as the boy sorted through his pocketbook, ‘I don’t know. The old girl’s round the bend. What’s this about your kid got a light around its head?—and your girl’s a—’ But the look came once more. A strange look almost—frightening. ‘Well, like that other lot, Jesus and all. She’s mad.’
‘She has some ideas,’ said the boy. ‘That doesn’t make her mad.’
But not everyone agreed with him. The greengrocer’s wife tackled Marilyn one day when she went out for the shopping, Mrs. Vaughan left worshipping the baby at home. ‘They’re all saying she’s going off her rocker. You shouldn’t be there, what with the baby and all. It could be dangerous.’