The Soldier's Bride (6 page)

She’d touched on it last week but beyond saying, yes, he must sort something out, as if he was really saying he must prepare them for someone like her, nothing had yet come of it.

‘You’re not ashamed of me, are you, David?’ Her
bluntness, sharp and exasperated, surprised even herself. She’d never seen him look so hurt.

‘How can you think that, Letitia?’ He always said her full name, much to Dad’s approval.

‘You
know
I love you?’ You know I love you. Never that breathless, desperate sigh: ‘I love you – I love you – I need you!’ A gentle kiss on leaving, that was his way, his hand lingering on hers. But, oh, for the ardent trembling of passion, crushed in desperate embrace.

She would of course have pushed him away, for decency’s sake, but to have the opportunity … All these months, and they were no closer physically than when they’d first met. Oh, yes, he took her out to places most girls in her neighbourhood would have given their eye teeth to see, treated her handsomely, but that something that should have developed between them just hadn’t. Why did he seem always to hold her away? But she knew why. It was where she lived, this rat hole. She saw it in that look of distaste when he came calling on Sundays, pushing through the coarse-mouthed bedlam of Club Row, past stallholders who spat on the cobbles and street traders who accosted everyone within arm’s reach.

Until she’d met David she had never really taken a good look at the place, but now had become increasingly conscious of down-at-heel streets, of alleys reeking of urine; alleys where prostitutes lurked, and where men, faces scarred by razors, met to do deals and plot revenge; where a beating up or a stabbing nearly every night of the week only just evaded the police murder files.

Despite the authorities having swept away the Nichol
which had been a so-called rookery of thieves and prostitutes operating from squalid lodging houses, and despite their having put up blocks of flats where decent if poor families tried to keep up appearances, it had changed only outwardly. It was still there just under the surface. The crime, the prostitution, the dirt.

Even now, with the area supposedly cleaned up, decent parents didn’t let a girl go out after dark unless she was with other girls and boys, and then she was required to be home by nine.

The grime of London’s smoke clung to everything. Washing never came up white, new bricks turned black within a year. Even faces had that grimed-in pallor. Stunted growth too. Cockneys were small people, small and tough. Mum and Dad were an exception, both above average height, passing it on to their girls, making them look ladylike.

Grime wasn’t the only thing that clung to this place. Mum’s kitchen smelled of Sunlight soap and Flit. The Flit was used on the walls and all corners and cracks – against the bugs. They came through the walls from the flats on either side of this one, even though the Solomons who had the corn chandler’s next door kept their place spotless and Mr Jackman, a dapper little man who had the pet store on the other side, was just as particular. But nothing stopped the evil little insects.

It was always worse in summer after they’d been breeding in cracked brickwork. They came out in droves then. It was part of life in slum places and Mum swore they dated from when Arnold Circus had been the Nichol.

Running alive there they had been. In the maze of alleyways, the people hadn’t even noticed them, let alone tried to get rid of them. Vice and lice, Letty remembered Mum saying. You don’t get rid of things like that just by using a bit of Flit.

She could remember venturing into the place when she’d been about seven or eight. Some blousy women with straggly hair and scarlet lips had snarled at her to sling her bleedin’ hook, but one had leered at her and beckoned. That one had frightened her more than the others.

When she got home she had asked Mum about the women and had got a smack instead of an answer. ‘What were yer doin’ down there?’ Mum had railed. ‘Ain’t yer got no sense, goin’ near ladies of the night?’ She had never used the word ‘prostitute’. It was a rude word. Letty aged eight would not have known what it meant anyway. She hadn’t even understood what ladies of the night were except ever after to link the phrase to ugly and threatening women with scarlet lips and straggly hair.

The Nichol was gone now. Arnold Circus with its streets radiating like the spokes of a wheel from a central hub where now stood a raised bandstand where a band played each Sunday was clean even if the barrack-like blocks of flats shaded everything from the sunshine. Hordes of children played there now, and any passerby could go through it without fear of being robbed, kidnapped or corrupted.

If the original slum had been swept away, its bugs remained, and in summer marched down the walls in black fetid clusters. The flat would smell faintly but not pleasantly of almonds as Mum Flitted every nook and cranny
against the invaders that might be breeding behind the wallpaper. To her the almond smell was one of shame and she waged constant war. Thanks to her they never had a full-scale infestation, but some people did.

With Mum ill now, it was Letty who wielded the Flit can as regularly as she used big square bars of Sunlight soap on the lino and the linen.

Mum and Dad had done their best to see their girls decently brought up, but it hadn’t been enough, or at least seemed that way, seeing David’s face after he’d fought his way through the screeching Sunday morning market to Dad’s shop door.

‘You know I love you,’ she wanted to cry. ‘Show me how much you love me, David.’ Instead she said sullenly, ‘I s’pose if I lived somewhere better than what I do, you’d have taken me to see your parents by now!’ diction letting her down, proclaiming her for what she was.

David was glaring at her. ‘To hell with where you live! You’ll not have to live here forever. It’s what you are that matters. It’s me you will marry, not my parents!’

‘But it’s a different matter when it comes to meeting them!’ She shot at him, then stopped. ‘Marry?’ she echoed faintly. ‘Me? You … want to marry me?’ But pride drew her up. ‘You’re only saying that.’

She saw him frown. ‘What is wrong with you, Letitia? Of course I am saying that. How else can I say it?’

Knowing what she wanted from him but unable to put it into words, she shrugged, defeated. ‘It don’t … doesn’t matter.’

‘It does matter, Letitia.’ He was pulling her to face him.
‘Tell me what’s wrong? You’re not … not getting tired of me, are you?’

Tired of him? God help her! Her whole being trembled in case he was tiring of her. Was this how he was wriggling out of it, telling her she was getting tired of him? Oh, it was unfair!

‘I don’t know how to tell you,’ she burst out, saw real fear come into his eyes at her outburst. ‘I know I ain’t … I’m not much ter run after. I know you could do better than me where you live. I haven’t even seen where you live, but I bet it’s posh and nice and you see all nice girls. But I …’ She stopped, wanting to say, ‘I love you.’ ‘I … well, I’ve tried, David. I have tried. I try to be ever so careful what I say, what I do – in case I say the wrong things, do the wrong things, and you’ll see what I’m really like. I …’

She tailed off with another helpless shrug. He had let go of her shoulder, had gone quiet. She sank weakly back on the seat, staring at the cabby’s back. The man was grinning, damn him! Facing front, his features unseen, she knew by the stiffness of his neck that he was grinning, amused by the lovers’ tiff. She wanted to poke him in the back, ask what he thought he was laughing at, but that would have made her look more common than she was. And she had her pride. Why was David not saying anything?

When he did speak, his voice was low and hesitant. The driver wouldn’t hear it above the rattle of the taxi. She could hardly hear it.

‘Letitia, you shouldn’t have to be careful – wary – with me. It’s I who have been – am – wary of you. No, Letitia,’ as she let out a small exclamation of surprise, ‘I have been
terrified you’ll find me … stuck up, I think it is. I am constantly weighing what I say, how I say it, in case you see me as uppish, patronising, I don’t know … I know it sounds ridiculous to you, Letitia. For one so young, so fresh, you are full of confidence. So worldly.’

‘Me?’ Inside her laughter bubbled, full of bitter disbelief. ‘I’ve never been further than Southend, when you took me.’

‘You are wrong, Letitia.’ He was speaking unusually fast. ‘All my life I have been protected by my parents, my mother especially. Even when I married …’ He hesitated as though the word might offend. ‘I’ll not say it was arranged exactly, we were in love of course, but it had been rather expected by both our families that we would eventually wed. Then, when Ann and the baby …’ Again he paused, this time the words catching in his throat.

‘It took me a couple of years to pull myself together. Mother was a tower of strength to me. By the time I was able to face the world, her tower had become a prison, you might say. I felt I had to justify my every movement. The smallest show of merriment and she’d hark back to my loss, as though I was being disloyal. She couldn’t believe I could still cherish my wife’s memory and yet carve out a new life of my own. Letitia …’

She sat looking down at her hands in her lap, felt him turn to face her. ‘I have never been able to tell her about us. Not because I am in any way ashamed of you. I admire you, wish I were as certain of myself as you are. But I dread my mother’s inevitable reproach that I am casting aside my wife’s memory. I’ve no wish to put you through that.’

He fell silent, gazing at Letty, but she couldn’t meet his look although she felt its intensity. For some while she could find nothing to say. Though so much she wanted to say surged through her head, all of it would sound nonsensical if she did put it into words.

‘I wonder what she’d think if she knew where I lived?’

‘For God’s sake, Letitia!’ The sharpness of David’s tone made her jump. ‘Why do you put yourself down so? You’re as fine as anyone I’ve ever met, and I love you! I love you, Letitia.’

In the dimness of the taxicab, he leaned forward and kissed her. It was long and lingering, full of passion. Almost stifled, Letty felt herself melt into it, closing her eyes at the delicious feel of it. David’s breath was sweet and warm, and who cared what the driver thought of them?

Beyond the cab, Bethnal Green Road in full spate at ten o’clock at night reminded her that this wonder must end very soon.

‘We’re nearly home, David!’ she just about managed.

His response was to call to the cabby to stop. ‘We’ll walk from here,’ he said, paid the man his fare, then holding her arm through his walked with her the short distance to her road, passing the Knave of Clubs on the corner. In the glow from the pub windows, the frosted glass etched by advertisements for Nicholson’s Matchless Dry Gin and Walker’s Whisky, he slowed. Nearby, the hot chestnut stand wafted nutty smoke, the bearded vendor turning the roasting nuts on a blackened metal sheet, hands protected by scorched woollen gloves, his cheeks a fiery red from the heat of the brazier.

All around Letty, people surged by, the door to the Public pushed open time after time, emitting laughter, rushes of warm air into the chilly night, the potent smell of beer and tobacco and sawdust.

‘I want you to come with me next Sunday to meet my parents,’ David said abruptly. And now, after weeks of clamouring for that honour, Letty was caught by fear, by foreboding, wishing she’d kept quiet.

‘I should have waited a bit longer,’ she told Lucy, who could hardly wait to hear how she had got on. ‘I should never have gone.’

‘Was she horrible to you?’ Lucy asked avidly over the teacups.

It was teatime, the table laid halfway across. There were only the two girls to have tea. Dad was downstairs, would be up as soon as he closed the shop, and Mum had gone to bed. She tired quickly these days. Lucy would take her a cup and a bit of cake later. She ate very little, as if the act itself tired her. At night Letty lay awake listening to Mum coughing, Dad getting up regularly to get her medicine for her. It was all so worrying.

‘Horrible ain’t the word,’ she said acidly, putting the last of the Sunday fruitcake on the table next to the cheese dish. ‘I’ve never felt so uncomfortable in all my life, and I was so sorry for David, he was so worried. And he behaved so different there than when he’s with me – all stiff and starched, as though he was watching every word he said and everything he did – just like I was! And all the time I sat there I didn’t know where to put me face
or what to do with me hands, I was so nervous.’

As Lucy cut bread and buttered it, Letty told of the imposing double bay-windowed house with its large high-ceilinged rooms and its heavy Victorian furniture. ‘They did have some lovely things,’ she said. The way David’s mother had received her. ‘Her face all stiff, it was like looking at a white ship all posh, standing off from East India Docks – me being East India Docks. Come to think of it, she was in white – a sort of tea gown thing – all frills and froth and drapes, as if she was going to a royal ball or something instead of just meeting me. All I hope is I don’t have to go there again, that’s all.’

‘What was his dad like?’ Lucy said, spreading jam for herself on a piece of buttered bread.

‘Oh, he wasn’t so bad,’ Letty said as she bit into her slice. She took a sip of tea to wash it down, Mum’s thick sturdy everyday cups and saucers, painted with fern leaves, and thought of the fine china at the Baron home. Sunday luncheon it had been termed – set more like a banquet with so many knives and forks and things, she hadn’t known which to use first, having to watch David before she dared to pick one up – all designed to intimidate her, she was sure. And a good job it had done too.

‘I think he was a bit sorry for me. But he didn’t approve of me either for all that. He kept looking at me as if he had a real low opinion of me. And all the time she kept referring to her poor David’s sad loss. Made me feel proper awkward, it did. And how do they get their o’s and a’s to sound like they’ve got a plum in their mouth? Ours always sound flat, have you noticed, Lucy? I tried to make them
rounder but it made it look like I was trying to show off. I wasn’t half glad when me and David left. I ain’t never going to go to meet them again, not if David goes on his bended knee to me.’