She fled from the table to her room to cry and later on she snuck out to meet David and buried her head in his arms. It seemed as if they were the only two people in the world. She asked him about his wife, even though she didn’t care if he had a wife, or ten million children. All that mattered was the two of them.
‘I’m not with her no more,’ he explained, as Mary looked at him inquisitively. ‘It were a stupid mistake. I got married and had kids. I was too young, I’m still only 18, and I want to be with you.’
Mary looked up at him in despair. ‘They told me that if I see you again they’re going to send me away to Torquay,’ she said as she felt his strong heartbeat through his nicotine-stinking windcheater.
‘Good,’ he said defiantly. ‘Let them.’
The next week, as she was put on to a train at Manchester Piccadilly station, her mother gave her a final hug in the aisle of the carriage while Tom heaved her suitcase up on to the luggage rack. He looked at his daughter awkwardly before hugging her himself.
‘It’s for the best, love, you’ll see. Give us a ring when you get to Torquay. Your cousins will help you get some work as a waitress, OK?’
Mary nodded dutifully, hoping they didn’t look at her too closely and see what she was really thinking. As the train eased out of the station she waved one last time and then turned to watch Manchester slip away past the window. No sooner had the suburbs disappeared than the train pulled into Stockport station. Doors clanked open and new passengers bustled on board, accompanied by a burst of chilly air.
‘Come here often, love?’ said a familiar voice. David plonked himself down next to her and kissed her full on the lips. She smiled a smile of utter faith as he threw his bag on to the rack next to hers. ‘Next stop St Ives,’ he said, grinning devilishly. She didn’t understand why her parents hated him because the more powerful he seemed, the deeper she slipped into love with him. To her, David was a charming, kind, talented and exciting man. He made her life worth living.
She would soon find out that their fairy-tale elopement wasn’t going to be the idyll she had dreamed of. Once they reached St Ives, Mary phoned her parents and lied, telling them that she had arrived in Torquay safe and sound and that she would start to look for work as a waitress the next day. They didn’t need to know that in fact David had checked them into a boarding house as Mr and Mrs Vaughan and they would be living in blissful sin. Before long Mary did find herself a job as a waitress, at a seaside restaurant called the Captain’s Table. Her good looks meant people always wanted to employ her because she attracted custom in the right way. David started to paint and fit into the local artists’ community. But she soon found out that trouble had a habit of following David. He told her more about his eccentric grandmother and she got the feeling that he had been a wild kid, only saved by his talent for art and drawing, which he had been encouraged to pursue at school. His teachers had praised his talent, and for Mary it was this talent and those words ‘I want to draw you’ that gave David his charm.
It wasn’t long before their playing at Mr and Mrs in St Ives was interrupted, when Mary was spotted in the restaurant by a friend of her parents from back home in Denton. Mary knew this meant trouble and told David as much later that night, when they were in bed.
‘They’ll grass us up. I’ll have to go back to Denton. What are we going to do?’
‘Fuck ’em,’ said David in his usual careless tone. ‘We’ll just run away again.’
‘Where to?’ said Mary, having just starting to settle into life in Cornwall.
‘London, of course,’ said David, lighting a cigarette. ‘I’m bored here anyway.’
Soon enough they got the phone call from Mary’s parents telling her to leave David and come home immediately. Soon afterwards Mary and David were on the train to London.
After the picturesque, seagull-filled cobbled lanes of St Ives, getting off the train in scary, dirty London seemed as terrifying as it was exciting. In time they found a small bedsit above a shop on Tyndale Road, off Upper Street in Islington. It was September 1964 and David was full of enthusiasm, applying for a scholarship to the Slade School of Art on the advice of artists he’d met in St Ives who had seen his talent. He was accepted by the school, one of the most prestigious in the country. Mary used what little money they had from her waitressing and odd jobs to spruce up their single room. She idolised David’s style and copied the fashions and trends she saw about her on the London streets, experimenting with velvet and glitter and bits of fabric. It was the beginning of the Swinging Sixties and London was the centre of the universe. They were now bona fide grown-ups, sharing their first home together.
Soon, though, Mary missed a period. She realised that now they were going to be playing at being parents too. Not knowing what to do, and having no one to call, she’d found the self-help book on pregnancy and read it thoroughly, both scared and excited about telling David. Scared because she had realised that, along with his charm and talent, came temper and violence. The kind, lovely, handsome, rugged bloke she adored was tainted by the chaos of his strange upbringing. He was constantly getting into fights and often wouldn’t come home because he’d been in a drunken brawl and got himself arrested. By then she was scared too, because she’d cut all ties with her old world. After she hadn’t come home from St Ives, her father had told her that they were going to disown her. She couldn’t go home now, and she knew no one in London. Apart from the baby growing inside her, David was all she had. As much as she loved him, she had started to fear the stranger inside him. For all his tenderness and passion, there was a part of him that wasn’t her David.
Mary lifted her head from the pillow, disturbed by another agonising contraction. She couldn’t believe that so much had happened since that meeting on the bridge just over a year before, and now she was about to have a baby of her own. There were two or three nurses in the room, all busy staring up between her legs.
‘One more push, Mary, love! That’s it!’ one of them said and smiled at her.
All Mary could see was stars in front of her eyes as pain blurred her vision. A red mist flooded her head as blood and sweat mingled in her nose and mouth. Then suddenly she cried as she heard a high-pitched scream and her baby was plopped on to her chest.
‘It’s a girl!’ said the nurse excitedly, examining the scrawny little scrap. Mary stroked her baby and the relief from the agony brought forth more tears.
‘What are you going to call her?’ asked the nurse, cleaning the afterbirth from the puce-coloured little body. Mary stared at her child in rapture and wonder, full of the most weird feeling of belonging and peace. ‘I’m going to call her Sadie.’
The shouting in the corridor had started up again and two of the nurses left the delivery room. Mary began to recognise the man’s voice. It was David.
‘I just wanna see my fuckin’ daughter!’ he roared, then there was more scuffling.
‘You can’t go in there, sir. You’re not legally her husband. It’s against hospital rules. If you don’t leave now I’ll call the police and have you arrested,’ said the nurse.
‘I don’t care about the fuckin’ rules. I’m a bastard and so is my little girl.’
Suddenly the door to the room was flung open and David fell through it, followed by a nurse and a hospital porter who desperately tried to pull him out again. He broke free, stood up, stared at Mary and approached the bed nervously. She closed her eyes, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. She didn’t want any trouble but all the same he was all she had. As David leaned over and took a long look at his daughter, so small and perfect, his eyes hardened, making him look older than his 19 years, and he pulled back.
‘She’s not fuckin’ mine. Look at her,’ he said finally, turning away.
‘What? Course she’s yours,’ said Mary, confused. ‘Look at her again.’
David glanced once