The Soldier's Bride (20 page)

Billy took her to the music hall, the Hackney Empire, and then to a little corner cafe for a slap up meal of pie
and mash, saveloys and peas pudding for himself. He talked the whole evening, made her laugh, then took her home, kissed her on the cheek when she did not offer her lips, asked if she would write to him. She said yes, she would.

After he’d gone, she cried, missing him already, felt terribly sad. Beneath the banter of goodbye he had looked strangely lonely as he threw her that final wave, sort of lost. She had felt an urge to run after him, throw her arms about him and tell him it would be all right – it would all be over by Christmas. The newspapers that had gravely reported the retreat of the British Expeditionary Force from Mons at the end of August were now, by the beginning of September, gleefully reporting the Germans retreating back to the River Aisne.

But it wasn’t leaving home to fight that had made Billy look so sad and lonely, she knew. All these years, for all his good looks, he had never stayed long with any girl and seeing his forlorn wave, even as he made it appear so non-chalant, she knew herself was the reason. Dear, sweet Billy. If … She swept aside sudden apprehension that was almost like a premonition. Of course he would be all right!

She thought again of the thousands of men flocking to join up and then of David. Had he too joined that queue? Perhaps not so much in national outrage but in a rage against her? Thinking of David, thoughts of Billy all drifted away, her apprehension for him transferring itself to David. What if … She had to get in touch with David before he, like Billy, did something rash.

Swallowing her pride, Letty went next-door to Mr
Solomons on Sunday and, with his kind permission, risked another telephone call to David’s parents. To her intense delight, it was David who answered.

For a moment her throat seemed to close up, the words she wanted to say trapped there. When at last the tightness gave, they flowed from her in a torrent.

‘David! Oh, darling, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean … I want to marry you, darling … if you’ll still have me? I want to so much and I don’t care who wants to stop me. I want … Oh, please, David, don’t be angry at me. Come back … come and see me … come …’

She heard his voice, the strange quality of it, and knew exactly what he had done.

‘Letitia. I’m leaving tomorrow.’

‘You’ve not gone and enlisted?’

‘I’m sorry, Letitia. I felt it my duty. They need officers. With my schooling and background, they jumped at me. Don’t worry though, I shan’t be going abroad, not yet. I’m to be trained to train recruits for the time being.’

Letty listened, stunned. His tone was so casual. After her frantic avowal of love, it was so casual.

‘I see. That’s it then, is it?’ Her own voice sounded equally as formal as his. She’d made a fool of herself.

‘David, I still feel the same about you.’

‘I know,’ came the voice over the wires.

‘I mean what I said, about marrying you.’

‘I know.’

There was only dull defeatism, resignation, in his voice. Her temper flared briefly. ‘Is that all you can say – I know? David, I want to see you. I
have
to see you. Please! Just the
once. To talk it out. Please come and see me. I promise I won’t …’

She stopped abruptly. One couldn’t go on pleading indefinitely.

She listened intently to the silence at the other end, her mind in a whirl to divine what he was thinking. All the time pride fought a battle with her need. ‘Oh, David, answer me,’ cried that need. ‘Say you will. I need you. Oh, dearest God, how I need you. Don’t go away. Don’t hang up.’ And pride rebuked her. ‘Lowering yourself like the stupid worm you are! If he don’t care, lowering yourself won’t get him. You’re just making yourself look cheap.’ She had half begun to say his name, need winning the battle, when he spoke.

‘I’ve got to leave tomorrow. But if you want us to talk, I could come over in half an hour. Will that suit you?’

Oh, yes, darling! ‘That’ll be fine,’ she said quietly.

‘See you in half an hour or so, then.’

The earpiece clicked into silence against her ear and she replaced it with exaggerated care, called thank you to Mr Solomons; heard his hoarse acknowledgement float down the stairs.

By the time David arrived, Letty’s nervousness was unendurable. Tears persisted in welling up over her lower eyelids despite her repeatedly brushing them away with the back of her hand. She stood in the shop, Dad well into his Sunday afternoon nap upstairs, and as a precaution she had tied back the shop doorbell so as not to alert him when – if – David came.

She saw him pull up outside the shop, with an effort
stopped herself from running out to meet him. She stood straight-backed as he came in, noted the exaggerated way he concentrated his attention to closing the door so he wouldn’t have to look at her.

When he did, pity ran through her; his eyes looked so mournful, darker than she’d ever seen them, as if a life-time of suffering was gathered there. He dropped his gaze immediately to his hands, making a careful exercise of dragging off his driving gloves.

‘You wanted to talk, Letitia?’

Oh, how she wanted to talk; to throw herself at him, fall to her knees and clasp him beg …

‘I thought we should,’ she said evenly. Please, she prayed, don’t let my eyes look red. ‘We couldn’t just end it like that, David. You going off in your car that Sunday. You didn’t even wave …’

Her voice had begun to tremble. There was no controlling the tears that rose now over her lid to slide thickly down her cheek, and she couldn’t properly brush them away without drawing his attention. ‘Oh, David …’

The next second she was in his arms, not knowing if it was she who had run to him or he to her, or both of them together. All she knew was that they were standing together in the centre of the shop, each clasping the other, she sobbing on his shoulder fit to burst, David murmuring words of love and comfort in a voice that quivered with emotion.

‘I want to marry you, David,’ she heard herself sobbing. ‘Please, I want to marry you.’

‘When?’ The word sounded drawn out, almost doubting.

‘As soon as possible. It don’t have to be special. But as soon as we can.’

‘My parents won’t like it, you know. They’ve never taken much to you.’ There was quiet laughter in his voice, the laughter of relief. It surged through her too, in a flood of love and happiness.

‘My dad won’t like it either.’ For a second reality buffeted her. Dad. All the old fears came rushing back. How could she stand there and tell him … No, she would not think of that. He had almost ruined their love, their future together. He would do so again if she allowed him. But not this time. Didn’t David have as much a battle with his parents? He had never let them stand in his way. Nor would she let Dad.

She reached up, took David’s lean face between her palms, stared up into his dark eyes – dancing now.

‘It’s us, David, not them what matters,’ her tones sharp and emphatic, careless of flattened vowels, carried away with all that crowded her mind. ‘They’ve been married, been happy. Now it’s our turn. We’ve got to be. I don’t care a bugger who’s against who. I’m goin’ ter marry you!’

Suddenly her throat clogged up, choked her into silence, and David kissed her as he had not kissed her in a very long while.

Over the telephone Albert’s normally superior voice sounded anguished. ‘Vinny – she lost the baby!’

‘Oh, Albert – no!’ Letty’s own throat constricted in shock and sorrow. ‘Oh, that’s a terrible thing. Is Vinny all right?’

‘Not in danger, but … Letty, she’s in a terrible state. I don’t know what to do for her. I’ve been in touch with my parents but my father is caught up at work and Mother can’t travel here on her own, certainly not in this weather. Vinny keeps saying she wants you and her father. Can you get over?’

‘Yes, of course.’ Letty’s response was instant and automatic, yet in the same instant common sense prevailed. Eight in the morning, a November fog enveloping everything in a bilious yellow blanket. ‘If I can get there,’ she moderated. ‘You can’t see a hand before you over here. But if the 35 bus to Walthamstow is running, I’ll try. But Dad won’t be able to come. He’s got a nasty cough coming on. And he’s got to keep an eye on the shop.’

It sounded very reluctant and she didn’t mean to be. ‘I’ll do my best,’ she said.

‘If you could.’ Albert was obviously setting aside his
normal self-esteem with an effort. ‘I’d … she would be so relieved.’

By nine the fog had lifted fractionally, though it was still almost midday before she finally alighted in Walthamstow from a crawling bus, the suburban fog a little whiter and thinner with a colourless sun’s disc breaking through.

It was sixty-thirty when she got back, fog coming down thick as pea soup, necessitating her feeling her way, virtually by hand, from the bus stop at the Shoreditch end of Bethnal Green Road. The world was eerie silent. An occasional figure, creeping like herself, would materialise out of the miasma to startle her momentarily and melt again into the fog as she passed. She counted the spectral haloes of street lamps to home.

‘We’ve got to have a telephone,’ she said to Dad as she warmed her hands gratefully by the fire after unwrapping herself from enshrouding yards of clothing. ‘I should have stayed the night with Vinny. I could have if I’d telephoned you. It was murder having to come all this way home in this weather. I’m frozen to the marrow!’

She shivered as proof and continued her original theme. ‘We can’t expect Mr Solomons to keep running round here, or us begging to use his every time we have to get in touch with someone. Thank God Vinny’s got one and I could tell Lucy about her. The fog’s not so bad out of London. Jack’s taking her to stay with her. We need to keep in touch.’

Her whole speech was a rebuke to him, one he managed to gloss over with a prolonged fit of coughing.

‘Load of fuss,’ he said, irritable at having been put out, expected to keep an eye to the shop, in his condition.
‘Anyone’d think she’s the only one to’ve ever lost a kid. Askin’ yer ter run right over there, like it was next-door. They expect too much of yer. And you, yer silly easy-going cow, let ’em do it! Leavin’ me stuck down there in that cold bloody shop. Me with me chest.’

Letty turned from warming her hands to throw him a look. ‘Come on, Dad. You often go down, even in this weather. Wandering about, fingering this, fingering that.’ She dearly wanted to add ‘But come the hard graft of buying and selling, and you make sure of being well out of it’. But she thought it better to keep those thoughts to herself. She was too exhausted with the cold eaten right into her bones to have him start a row. To all intents and purposes, it had become her shop and she did not relish any interference from him at this stage in her life; making all the decisions herself now, hardly ever consulting him.

‘Might as well not be ’ere at all fer all you tell me what’s goin’ on,’ he would complain, but never took it any further, merely enjoyed making a business out of complaining, Letty thought uncharitably as she rubbed her hands together vigorously against the last strands of chill in her bones and set her mind to getting him his tea.

‘It was a girl,’ she told him as she moved back and forth between the kitchen and the parlour. ‘It’s sad. She did so want a girl too.’

‘She’ll just ’ave to content ’erself waiting till next time.’ Sitting up to the tea table, he bent his head to indulge in a long rumbling cough while Letty eyed him speculatively. With autumn well established, his cough promised to return full strength. With no notion how bad it would get, Letty
just prayed it would remain as moderate as it had last year.

‘Don’t it worry you that Lavinia’s all upset and miserable, losing her baby? She’s really not herself, Dad. She’s been longing for a girl.’

‘So yer just said. Yer mother, God rest her soul, was always upset when she lost one, boy or gel. Yer poor mum, she …’

His voice faded, tears flooded his faded eyes at the memory and he stared sightlessly down at his plate, wiping the back of his thin hand against his eyes.

Letty, exasperated, went on sawing at the loaf, grasping it in an attitude of desperation against her aproned breast as she cut. Once she would have gone to him, put an arm on his shoulders, laid her head against his, trying to instil comfort. But it had gone on too many years. Now she was simply irritated by it.

Vinny had more need of Mum than did Dad. ‘If only Mum was here,’ she’d said. ‘I want her to put her arms around me. I want it so much.’

It was pitiful. Letty had cried with her. Yet here was Dad all sorry for himself, hardly sparing a thought for anyone else. How then would he ever lay aside his own sense of loneliness enough to smile upon her marriage to David?

David had a whole week’s furlough at the start of December. He came to see her on Saturday after the shop had closed.

He’d telephoned her the moment he had got home, Dad finally being convinced of its necessity for business and his own peace of mind, his cough steadily worsening with the onset of winter. He’d allowed it to be put in downstairs in
the shop but refused perversely to answer its ring, as if this last gesture of stubbornness exonerated him utterly from any part in its installation.

So Letty had answered David’s call, her father fortunately having a nap at the time so she had no need to tell him any white lies. David saying he would be there around seven, she had muffled the doorbell and waited downstairs in the darkened shop. She would let the doorbell tinkle after half an hour of privacy with David then bring him upstairs as though he had just arrived.

She waited with trepidation growing steadily, knowing full well the reason behind her secrecy. There was urgency in being in love these days, in snatching it wherever and whenever.

‘And you
are
still willing to marry me?’ David asked after she had welcomed him with a long eager kiss. In reply she drew him into the shadows of the back of the shop, lifted her lips to his again.

‘Of course I am, darling.’ It wasn’t easy to make her voice sound utterly without reservation. Dad’s winter cough had come on him early, had her running between the shop and his bedroom with linctus and winter green, fairly wearing her out. Hopefully he’d be better soon.