Across the Mersey (27 page)

Well, it had just better work, that was all, Bella thought fiercely. Six times now she had had to put up with ‘doing it’, Alan panting and grunting on top of her. The first night, after he’d said he wanted to listen to the wireless and then fallen fast asleep the minute he’d got into bed with her, had been the worst.

First she’d had to wake him up. Then when she had, he pushed ‘it’ into her hand and made her touch it, his breath stinking of beer as he moaned and groaned. And then as if that hadn’t been bad enough, when he’d finally ‘done it’ inside her, he’d made a funny sort of noise and shouted out Trixie’s name at the top of his voice before rolling off her and then falling back asleep before she could say anything.

The horrible unwanted Polish refugees she was forced to have living with her were bound to have heard him. In fact, she knew they must have done because the daughter had given her such a smug look in the morning.

Bella didn’t know which she hated the most, Alan or what she was having to do. One thing she was determined on, though: Trixie was going to be put in her place and her nose very firmly rubbed in the dirt. Alan was her husband, and she intended to make sure that Trixie was forced to accept the public shame of what she had made herself.

Once Bella had set her mind to something she didn’t give up easily and so every night since she’d seen Alan kissing Trixie, she’d waited for him to get into bed and then she’d made sure that he did ‘it’.

Men were supposed to do anything you wanted them to do once you’d let them do it, but instead of being grateful to her, Alan had been even worse-tempered and horrible than normal. It was all right for Trixie, sitting there in that office, thinking she was something special because Alan was kissing her. Bella was ready to bet that she wouldn’t be making up to him the way she was if she knew how rough and horrible he could be. Bella had bruises all over her body from him grabbing and pinching her.

When he was doing it he looked at her as though he hated her, and wanted to hurt her, his face hard and angry. Well he’d be sorry for the way he’d behaved when he found out she was going to have a baby. They all would. She could see herself now, pushing her smart new pram, and getting admiring and envious looks from everyone who saw her. She’d insist on Alan’s father getting rid of Trixie, of course. At first she’d just drop a few hints to
Alan’s mother about it not being right that Trixie was there, and then she’d come right out and tell her why – and in front of Trixie and her parents. Oh, she was looking forward to that, and to the humiliation that Trixie would suffer.

Then she’d tell those wretched refugees that they had to go. She couldn’t be expected to have strangers living with her when she was having a baby. Where was Alan? If he was letting that Trixie make up to him … Bella didn’t like the feeling that thinking about seeing Alan kissing Trixie gave her, so she decided to ignore it. Alan would have to start giving her more housekeeping, of course. She would have to buy lots of things for the baby – and for herself.

Francine looked anxiously at her watch.

‘Vi said she’d be here at two and it’s half-past now.’

‘She’s probably been delayed,’ said Jean. She was every bit as anxious as Francine, although she was trying very hard not to show it.

‘If she doesn’t come I’m going to go over there and see her.’

Jean’s anxiety grew as she heard the desperation in Fran’s voice. ‘She will come, Fran, I’m sure of it,’ she tried to sooth her.

‘It certainly put the wind up her when I telephoned her and told her that if she didn’t I’d be over there. Edwin’s probably told her not to let me into the house. He never liked me, and he certainly doesn’t approve of me.’

‘Sam reckons Edwin looks down on all of us,’ Jean told her, and then paused, wanting to warn Francine not to expect too much from Vi or to get her hopes up too high, but worried that if she did she might only make matters worse. ‘Vi’s changed, Fran. You’ll see that for yourself, you not having seen her for so long. I suppose it’s only natural, what with Edwin’s doing so well for himself.’

‘You always did defend her, Jean.’

‘She means well, but she likes having her own way. She always has, and she doesn’t take kindly to being criticised.’

Francine pounced immediately, demanding sharply, ‘You don’t think I should be doing this, do you?’

Her voice might sound sharp but Jean could hear the telltale emotional break in it. Her heart ached for Fran, but she knew what Vi could be like. The truth was that it was little Jack himself she was most worried about – and about whom she felt so much guilt. She struggled to find the right words to calm Francine down and yet at the same time acknowledge her own sympathy for her.

‘I didn’t think it was right them sending Jack away myself,’ she told her truthfully, ‘but you know what Vi’s like once someone gets her back up. She wouldn’t even give me his address so I could send him his Christmas presents. Said I had to give them to her and she’d send them. That did shock me, her not having him back home for Christmas,’ Jean admitted, ‘but—’

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ Francine stopped her. ‘You’re going to remind me that Vi is the one who has the right to say where he should go and what he should do.’

Jean looked at her, her heart filled with pain for her. ‘Vi and Edwin are his parents, love.’

‘Yes, I know that. And I’ve no room to talk, I know. It’s just—’ she broke off as they heard the front doorbell.

‘That will be Vi now,’ said Jean. ‘I’ll go and let her in.’

‘About time, Jean. I’ve been standing here for ages,’ said Vi sharply.

‘You’ve only just rung the bell,’ Jean told her twin mildly.

‘I really haven’t got time for this, what with all I’ve got to do. I’m the second in charge at our WVS now, you know, and I have responsibilities.’

Jean thought privately that no responsibility could be greater than the one a woman owed her child but she knew better than to say so.

Vi was on the attack the minute she walked into the kitchen, refusing to be parted from her expensive coat. She might be smartly dressed in her plum-coloured Jaegar skirt and toning twinset, but she had thickened out over the years, much more than Jean had herself, and in Jean’s eyes Vi looked nowhere near as elegant as Fran. Say what you liked, their younger sister stood out a mile as someone who had lived a different life, in her black woollen dress with its white collar and cuffs. Fran
looked so bandbox smart she could have stepped right out of the pages of one of those expensive magazines that Vi boasted about reading.

Both Vi and Francine looked out of place in her kitchen, Jean thought. You’d never have imagined looking at the three of them now that they’d all grown up in the same shabby little terraced house with no proper bathroom. Not that she envied either of her sisters their material success, not one little bit. Jean reckoned that of the three of them she was the one who was the happiest.

‘It really is most inconvenient, me having to come here,’ Vi was saying crossly, ‘and it’s very selfish of you to carry on like this, Francine.’

‘All I want is the address of where Jack is staying. You could have saved yourself a journey if you’d given it to me straight off when I asked.’

For a moment Vi looked taken aback, and Jean guessed that her twin had still been thinking of Fran as the cowed sixteen-year-old she had last seen nearly ten years ago.

‘I don’t know why you should be making all this fuss anyway, Francine. What business is it of yours where Jack is? You haven’t seen him since he was born,’ Vi reminded her, then rounded on her twin. ‘This is all down to you, Jean, making trouble, because you haven’t had the good sense to evacuate your two.’

‘Don’t go blaming Jean, Vi,’ Fran answered. ‘It’s me that has asked after Jack and wants to know where he is.’

‘Well, you can ask all you like. I’m not telling
you. I’m not having him upset when he’s settled. I’ll thank you to remember that me and Edwin are his parents.’

‘You aren’t acting much like parents, are you, sending him away and not even having him home for Christmas? And as for your Edwin, I reckon he never wanted him in the first place.’

Vi’s face was blotched with angry colour. ‘You’ve got no right to say that.’

Jean went cold and her heart missed a beat. She had been hoping against hope that Vi would not say that. But now it was too late, she had said it, and Francine had drawn herself up to her full height, which was a good two inches taller than Vi, closer to four with those high-heeled shoes she was wearing.

‘Oh yes I have.’

Francine’s voice was as soft as butter but as clear as the noonday sun. It shattered the careful ten-year-old fiction they had all spun between them with all the force of one of Hitler’s bombs being dropped on a glasshouse, and to just as devastating an effect.

‘After all,’ Francine pointed out fiercely, ‘Jack is my son.’

Jean bit her lip. This was what she had been dreading from the minute she had opened her front door and seen Fran standing there. There had been something she had seen in Fran’s eyes that had warned her that it wasn’t just the war that had brought her sister back. Even so, she truly believed that if Francine had seen that Jack was
happy and loved by Vi and Edwin, she wouldn’t have said anything. After all, it was plain that she loved her son and wanted the best for him.

Francine had been so young when she had had Jack, and unmarried. Jean would have taken Jack herself if she hadn’t been so ill, and then afterwards, when she had lost her own baby, she had wished desperately that she had had Jack, but it had been too late then. Vi and Edwin had stepped in and offered to take Jack and bring him up as theirs.

‘He’s been nothing but hard work since we took him in,’ Vi was raging now. She had never liked being put on the spot or criticised, and of course she was taking it out on Francine. ‘There’s bad blood in him and no mistake.’

‘He’s a little boy,’ Francine protested furiously. ‘All you had to do was love him; that was all. But you don’t love him. If you did he’d be here with you, not sent away to live with strangers.’

‘Me and Edwin have done our duty by him and by you. I don’t know how you dare speak to me as you are doing after the shame you brought on yourself. The shame you could have brought on all of us if it had got out what you’d done. There’s many a man would have said that kind of child should be sent to an orphanage and not brought up in a decent family. I’ve done my best with him but when there’s bad blood there it always comes out. If you ask me it will do him good to find out how lucky he was when me and Edwin had him. Teach him a bit of a lesson.’

‘I want to know where he is.’

‘Well, I’m not telling you.’

‘It’s only natural that Fran should want to see Jack, Vi,’ Jean intervened to try to calm things down. ‘I’d like to go and visit him meself, the poor little lad. I know how busy you are with your war work an’ all.’ She paused and looked at Francine, whose eyes were shining with tears. ‘After all, Fran does have the right, and I can’t see that it would do any harm.’

‘That’s the trouble with you, Jean: you’re far too ready to see more good in people than there is. Edwin was right. He warned me that no good would come of us having Jack. And as for you, Francine, I’ve never heard of such ingratitude. In your shoes I’d certainly not want to be talking about what I’d done, but then of course I’d never have done something so shameful.’

‘You’re right you wouldn’t – not with your Edwin.’

Francine’s temper was up now, Jean recognised and her anxiety grew.

Vi’s mouth had gone thin and vengeful. ‘You’re a disgrace to our family and you should have stayed in America. That way I wouldn’t have to be reminded that my sister was an unmarried mother and wouldn’t even tell anyone who the father was – if she knew.’

Francine went white and for a moment Jean feared for her self-control, but Francine simply drew in her breath and then let it out again unsteadily.

‘I wanted to take Jack to America with me where we could have a new start, but you begged me to let you have him. You said that he would have a better life with you, that I wouldn’t be able to give him the time or the love that you could because I’d be on my own and working. You said that if I really loved him then I’d let you have him because you and Edwin could give him so much more than I could. You said that you would be the best mother in the world to him and that Edwin would be his father. You said all those things to me, Vi, but none of them were true were they, because if they were then Jack would be at home with you.’

Tears filled Jean’s eyes. She really felt for Fran and always had done; right from the moment Fran had come to her and told her about her trouble and the man who had caused it. Not that Jean would ever have dreamed of telling Vi the name of Jack’s real father, knowing how her twin felt about actors and the stage.

‘This is ridiculous. There’s a war on in this country, I’ll have you know, and it was the Government that said that children should be evacuated, not me and Edwin.’ Vi was blustering now. ‘We’ve done our best for him and no one could have done any more, but he’s not been an easy child. I’ve never known a baby cry so much, or be so sickly. Drove Edwin mad, it did; kept us all awake and upset poor Bella dreadfully. She couldn’t bring her school friends home because of him. He was that slow at walking we thought there
must be something wrong with him. Edwin reckons that Jack hasn’t got a brain in his head.’

‘Give over do, Vi,’ Jean stopped her firmly. ‘Sam says he’s proper bright and you’ve said yourself that he’s always got his nose in a book.’ She turned to her younger sister. ‘He’s a lovely lad, Fran, a son anyone could be proud of.’

‘Well, you and me have got very different opinions of what makes a mother proud, then, Jean. That’s all I can say,’ said Vi.

Nothing that either of them could say to her could persuade Vi to change her mind and tell them where Jack was, and as Jean confided to Sam that night when they were in bed, she reckoned that Vi knew she had done wrong but was refusing to admit it.

‘I never thought I’d say this about me own twin, Sam, but what she’s done is downright wicked. Poor Francine went up to Grace’s room after she’d gone and cried her eyes out. I felt for her, I really did.’