The Soldier's Bride (27 page)

The rest of the players watched wordlessly as the can went flying, landed clattering along the pavement. The boy’s hand came up but the girl was already off. Apron flying like a flag in a high wind, knees going up and down, flashing pale through the threadbare stockings, she legged it down the street, shrieking abuse behind her, the boy in useless pursuit. As they disappeared, the watchers reformed into a circle, beginning solemnly to count out who next would be ‘it’.

George’s yearning to be there among them returned. ‘Can I go down and play, Mum?’

Emmeline had joined in. ‘Can I too, Mummy?’

Lucy, in conversation with Vinny, threw the child a look of extreme distaste. ‘No, you can’t. You’re not mixing with toe rags like that. Whatever next?’

Letty, still stinging from Lucy’s suspected reference to her as a maiden aunt, gave her a look. ‘It was toe rags like that you used to play with once. Though I imagine you’ve
forgotten – conveniently.’ The last uttered with a curl to her lip. She saw Lucy redden.

‘I hope I’ve moved on since then – tried to better myself.’

‘Nice to have had the opportunity to move on,’ Letty said acidly. ‘Some of us aren’t so lucky.’

‘No one asked you to stay here.’

No, no one had. It had just been assumed hers would be the role of companion to Dad, condemned to be a spinster because he’d been too full of his own needs to let her pursue hers. And her reward? To have some precocious eight year old chirpily refer to her as an ‘old maid’. She held Lucy in a steady look which her sister read clearly enough.

‘Some of us had no choice,’ she said slowly, ‘but to end up as a maiden aunt out of duty to someone else. You’re as selfish as him!’

Instantly she regretted the remark, saw her father stiffen, saw his head lift sharply; knew her words had bitten. But Lucy saw nothing but her own injured pride. Lines formed around her lips.

‘I don’t know how you can say such things! You had plenty of chance to get married. And now you’ve got no one. No wonder he went off and left you! Who’d want a person who cheapened herself like you did?’

‘He didn’t leave me. He was killed.’

How had she said it so coldly? How could she feel nothing from Lucy’s remarks? Oh, but she did – the pain, the emptiness, the awful bitterness, not from what Lucy had said, but that Lucy had not the tiniest notion of the wounds she opened.

Dad was scooping tobacco from his pouch into his pipe,
didn’t look up, didn’t look towards her though his face was tight. She saw his hand reach up, fumble for the matches on the mantelshelf above him.

‘By the clock, Dad.’

Amazing she could be so matter-of-fact, amidst all that turmoil going on inside her. She wanted to throw the matches in his face, run screaming from the flat. Yet here she was being quietly practical, rebuking herself in silence for being so when he didn’t acknowledge her, merely took up the box, extracted a match, struck it and applied the flame to the pipe bowl.

Vinny was looking anxiously from her to Lucy, holding Christopher defensively. But Lucy merely tossed her head, tutted, got up. Sweeping over to her daughters, she heaved the sash window closed with a sharp scrape, instantly muffling the cries of the children below.

‘Trouble with autumn,’ she said briskly, ‘you do get a cold wind springing up suddenly. It’s gone quite chilly. Here, Dad, I’ll put a bit more coal on the fire, shall I?’

All attention, dripping honey over Dad, and he regarding her with fatherly love as he never now regarded Letty. It was sickening.

Billy had come home. Letty went to ask if she could pop up to see him, as a friendly gesture.

Billy’s mother looked as though she had shrunk in size, and the expression in his father’s eyes, not quite looking at her but somewhere beyond as he nodded his consent, made Letty hurry up the stairs to their parlour.

What she saw made her hand fly to her throat for all
she tried to look natural as she approached him. In a civilian shirt, waistcoat and trousers that looked too large, Billy was sitting in a chair by the fire; the man hardly recognisable as the one who had so cheerfully gone to enlist that Saturday three years ago.

‘You don’t look half bad,’ she said, over bright. ‘Not half as bad as I thought you’d look.’

He looked as old as his father, except that his father’s hair was white and his was still fair, but the gloss was gone and his moustache had a thin stiff spikiness. It was the eyes that looked old, and the mouth, tight in a crooked sort of way as if it would never again smile spontaneously; had lost the knack. The gas in his lungs had given his cheeks a pinched look, colourless now, and he breathed as though he were panting, shallow and spasmodic.

‘You don’t look half bad,’ she said again, inadequately.

He managed to smile but the knack had gone.

‘You ’ad ter – see me at me worst. Didn’t cher?’ he said, the quip weak. He seemed not to have enough power for sentences of any length. As he coughed, it was a dry wheezing that didn’t ease him. ‘Should have waited. A few weeks. The doctors say I’ll improve. A few weeks – yer’d have seen me at me best. Could have swept yer – off yer feet. Then.’

Impulsively, Letty put her hand out to him, touched his arm. ‘I know you’re going to get better, Billy. Just give it time.’

His eyes travelled down to the hand, her left hand. She’d long ago placed her engagement ring back in its box, put the box into a drawer. To display the ring David had given
her seemed a sort of sacrilege. Not so had it been a wedding ring.

‘Yer didn’t get married then?’

Letty edged the hand behind her back.

‘He enlisted.’ She hoped her eyes would stay dry. ‘He was killed.’

There, she’d said it dry-eyed, her eyelids hadn’t even flickered, she remained staring aridly at Billy.

It was he who lowered his eyes, once vivid blue, the whites now bloodshot. He began to cough, conquered it with an effort, cleared his throat ineffectually. It made her want to cough in sympathy.

‘It was over two years ago – 1915.’

Billy’s lips twisted into a travesty of a grin. ‘Chance fer me then, except I ain’t nobody’s chance any more.’

‘Oh, Billy, don’t say that!’ she blurted out, and the tears forced themselves slowly over her lower lids and slid down her cheeks.

Lonely tears – for herself; for a son to whom she was auntie; for a young man made old; for a man whose body lay unsung, bones bleached white on some sun-parched plain; for the waste of it all.

‘Ain’t you ’aving nothing? Ain’t feelin’ off colour, are yer?’

The question was more peevish than concerned as Letty sank down in the armchair after dishing up Dad’s supper, her own bowl of stew untouched.

Sighing, she laid her head back. ‘Touch of the ’flu, I think. I don’t know.’

These last few days she’d felt achey, but told herself she would work through it as she carried on down in the shop. The door opening and shutting, customers letting in gusts of cold damp February air while she hovered close to the oil stove as often as she could, she now felt feverish, her head as though it were full of cotton wool.

‘Oughter see the quack,’ he said as he finished supper and went to sit by the fire a moment, his own bronchial state rattling his chest. ‘’Ave a look at both of us while he’s about it.’

The blazing fire uncomfortably affecting her already fiery cheeks while the rest of her remained shivery, Letty smiled.

‘Fine pair we are.’

He didn’t return her smile. ‘If yer go down with the ’flu, I can’t look after the shop in my state of ’ealth.’

The remark didn’t anger her; didn’t even hurt. Living under his unforgiving shadow so long, hurt and anger were more or less moribund.

‘You can always get Ada Hall to come in,’ she said listlessly.

It was an idea worth thinking about but he didn’t bother saying so. She might be better by morning. With a rumbling cough, he heaved himself out of his chair, thinking of bed, neglecting to say goodnight.

Letty had been lucky, getting over it like she had. Three miserable weeks of ’flu had worn her out completely.

‘People goin’ down with it right, left an’ centre,’ said Ada Hall, who had volunteered to come in and nurse her. ‘Needs a woman ter look after ’er,’ she’d said and offered her services there and then, much to Dad’s relief. He had kept himself as far away from Letty as possible.

Vinny’s boys had all gone down with it, and Letty in her more coherent moments had been worried sick for Christopher, unable to do a thing about it, unable even to lift her thumping head much less stir herself to get over there. Vinny reported all her boys were recovering, but Lucy was keeping her girls strictly away and wouldn’t have dreamed of coming over to nurse Letty, so it was Mrs Hall who had stepped in.

‘It’s really bad round ’ere,’ she had supplied as she fed Letty the medicine the doctor had left, warmed her feet with stone hot water bottles, coaxed her to take hot soup from a spoon – ‘Ter keep up yer strength,’ she’d said, and stoked up the little bedroom fire.

‘There’s three or four from this turning ’as died of it,’ she had regaled, an eager spreader of bad tidings. ‘It’s an epedemick. ’Undreds dying on the Continent, the papers say. That’s where it’s comin’ from – the Continent. It’s a killer. Even reached the United States of America, killin’ people off there too.’

Letty, propped up on pillows reading the accounts, realised how virulent it was and thanked her lucky stars that she had recovered. But she had a strong constitution, she knew that. She wouldn’t have survived the things she had if she hadn’t been strong.

Still abysmally weak, she rested her head back on the pillows, letting the newspaper she’d been trying to read fall on to the pink counterpane, too heavy for her exhausted muscles to support, and watched Ada Hall bustling around her bedroom armed with polish rag and feather duster, picking up ornaments, her personal little treasures, to dust them one by one, putting them back none too gently.

‘Best place for yer,’ she said, making another circuit of the room. ‘It’s ’orrible out. Cold. Enough to freeze the cannon balls off a brass monkey. Bet it’s a picture where your sisters live, though. Nice an’ white. ’Ere, it’s just slush. Yer wouldn’t credit the mess. Me boots is soaked through just coming down the road. No, love, yer in the best place.’

She gave Letty’s dressing table another quick flick. ‘My place’s freezin’. Windows let in all the draughts. ’Ate that flat I do. All the noise in the bar downstairs. Keeps me awake at night. Smells of beer and tobaccer. Stinks it do. Gets inter yer mats an’ yer curtains an’ all yer clothes.’

Letty could have laughed had she felt stronger. Ada Hall
worrying about her clothes smelling of beer – clothes that looked as though a good wash would have gone some way to help!

Ada gazed around the room that Letty had made very cosy over the years, a small fire burning in the little black-leaded grate, and picked up one of Letty’s china ornaments to study it.

‘I enjoy comin’ here. Nice and warm. Wish my place was as warm. Still, while I can make meself useful ’ere, I ain’t there, am I?’

Ada was still making herself useful weeks after Letty was up and about, back in the shop.

‘She don’t need to,’ Letty assured Dad after another fortnight of her coming in ‘to do for them’ as she put it. ‘I’m all right now.’

His amiability surprised her. ‘Yer need a bit of ’elp still,’ he said, the way she remembered as a child. ‘And I ain’t as young as I was.’

‘But I feel better,’ she insisted, keeping her voice down from the off key humming and the energetic clash of washing up in the kitchen. ‘We don’t’ want to bother her more than we need to.’

Truth was, to her mind Ada Hall was being allowed too much access; would come into the shop and straight upstairs with a cheery ‘mornin’ love!’ Not so much as, was it all right to go up?

‘She’s been good, I know, but really, we don’t need her here every hour of the day.’

Dad’s expression darkened faintly. ‘She’s been a good ’elp ter me. It’s the least we can do after what she’s done fer
us – to let ’er come ’ere. She’s very lonely. Besides she’s company for me.’

There was a time, Letty thought dolefully, giving up and going down to open the shop for the afternoon, when he’d considered
her
company – at the expense of her own freedom. But she should, she supposed, be thankful that he had cheered since Ada had parked herself on them and become more talkative. Thankful too that his bronchitis was magically miles better. He’d become a different man with Ada now popping in most evenings as well as during the day as the weeks wore on into spring.

Thankful or not, she couldn’t like Ada. Tolerate her, yes, but like her, no. Not when she would sit opposite Dad in the armchair, as if it were her right, Letty confined to the sofa – comfortable enough, but it was the principle of the thing that mattered. She noted too that Ada had begun sprucing herself as well, as she’d done once before, a few years back. Then it had come to nothing and she’d slipped back into her old ways. This time, there seemed to be more determination.

The scruffy hair had become tidier, her clothes smarter. She was changing her apron more often and those puffy cheeks with their broken veins were ruddy from more vigorous applications of soap and flannel than Letty suspected she had ever used before. Letty, remembering Mum with her smooth downy face, always neat, even when down on hands and knees scrubbing lino, resented Ada Hall’s intrusion into her mother’s domain – a role Letty herself amply filled as far as she was concerned.

Not that Ada wasn’t hardworking – she busied herself
with might and main, scrubbing lino and washing pots with the energy of a charity organiser, polishing fierce enough to break every last piece of Dad’s precious porcelain, all but elbowing Letty aside to get at the weekly wash like a starving dog going after a bowl of scraps.

‘I’ll do yer ironin’. You just put yer feet up, workin’ in that shop all day.’ Shirts and vests tugged from her, fit to tear, she’d set to work, happy as a sandboy.

‘I’ll just have to start paying you something,’ Letty suggested as Ada left one evening. It was April and no sign of her relinquishing her virtually self-appointed job, Letty’s offer was made in the same vein as saying ‘More tea?’ to someone who’d outstayed her welcome.