All Fall Down (12 page)

‘I got to finish this.' She gestured towards the heap of uncounted coins on her desk, blushed and turned away.

‘Leave it.' He caught hold of her wrist, bent forward and kissed her.

She took half a step back then stopped. She wanted him to kiss her again, she realized.

Her tilted face was all he saw, all he thought about; her clear grey eyes, the curling lashes, the open mouth. He pressed his own lips against hers, saw her close her eyes, felt her arms slide around him. He was kissing her again and again.

‘Tommy, stop!' She struggled to bring her arms up to his chest, to push him away. ‘No, don't stop.' Changing her mind as she opened her eyes and saw his face so close. Her arms went up and around his neck.

They melted together, the kisses grew less urgent, more tender. Edie tilted her head back as he brushed her neck with his lips. ‘Tommy, what are we gonna do?'

‘You said that before.' He was breathing in her perfume, not wanting to talk.

‘No, what I said then was, what am
I
gonna do? Now it's
we
. That's different.'

‘You sure?' She nodded.

‘I ain't just a shoulder to cry on?'

This time it was a shake of the head. ‘I ought not to be saying this, ought I?'

‘Me neither.' He wouldn't let her go, though. He drew her close and swayed with her.

‘I want you, Edie. I want another chance.' He rested his chin on her shoulder, she felt warm and soft.

Again she nodded. The vital move had been made: the first kiss and her decision to respond. From now on some things were relatively straightforward. ‘Will you come to my place?'

He held on more tightly. ‘Sure?'

‘About that, yes.'

‘When?'

‘Soon. Let me telephone Lorna to tell her I can't meet her. You lock up here.'

‘We could go along together.' He feared she would change her mind.

‘Better not.'

‘Half an hour, then?'

She leaned back and looked earnestly at him. ‘Be careful, won't you?' She lived above the post office, near the railway bridge that ran across the top end of Duke Street.

‘Leave the door open, all right? I'll slip in quietly and lock it behind me.'

They made their arrangements, still without quite believing that their tryst would take place. In a fumble, back towards normality, Tommy swept the uncounted cash into a cloth bag and stashed it in a drawer, promising to deal with it in the morning. Saturday was Edie's day off, in any case. She took her cream-coloured jacket from the stand by the door and put it on over her pink flowered dress. She came to kiss him on the cheek, then slipped away, her footsteps light and quick on the stairs.

Meanwhile, early that same evening, Sadie had stepped off the train in Manchester Piccadilly. The steam from the engine swirled
along the dirty roofs of the carriages and engulfed the alighting passengers in an acrid, damp cloud. She shook herself alert after the seemingly endless journey and walked determinedly along the platform under the giant glass arch towards the barrier where Jess would be waiting.

The sisters spied each other at the same moment. Sadie passed through the barrier, put down her case and embraced Jess, too moved to speak. Only after they'd wiped their eyes and picked up the luggage again did they begin to exchange the latest news. Grace, Jess's twenty-five-year-old daughter, was waiting for them at home. Mo, her son, was at work in the office of his father's cinema business. Like all young men in their early twenties, he was nervously waiting to be called up. Jess dreaded him having to go.

‘It doesn't seem five minutes since I was sending him off to school with a clean hankie and his dinner wrapped up in a napkin,' she sighed. ‘And now look at him, old enough to get himself shot.'

‘Don't.' Sadie stowed her case in the back of Jess's Austin. At nearly fifty, Jess had, like all the Parsons sisters, kept her slim figure and remarkably good features, her brown eyes still large and vital, her dark hair with hardly a hint of grey. She wore it fashionably long and wavy, with just enough make-up, and a modern style of dress. This evening, to meet Sadie, she had on a pair of high-waisted navy blue slacks and a tailored white top, one of her own outfits from the city centre shop. ‘You look lovely, as per usual,' Sadie said, half envious.

‘And you look worn out,' came the frank reply. They slammed the car doors shut and Jess started the engine. ‘Let's get you home. First thing you have is a nice long soak in the bath. Then tell me all about what's going on.'

Things had worked out differently for Sadie, you only had to look. Jess, too, had had an illegitimate child, the result of a violent attack by her one-time employer's son. But her family had stood by her and she and Hettie had set up in the rag trade, in a very small way at first. Then Maurice had come along and claimed her and, eventually, whisked the family up here to Manchester, to develop his chain of cinemas. He had succeeded but she had missed her
sisters sorely. Gradually she'd built up a new business, a new life. Sadie meanwhile, the youngest and in some ways the most reckless of the girls, had echoed her own misfortune. Meggie was also illegitimate, only Sadie had made it much harder for herself and the child, running away with Richie Palmer and cutting herself off from the family, until the inevitable had happened and Palmer had brought them all to the brink of tragedy, with Walter in hospital at death's door.

They motored out of the grimy city up a main road, past the redbrick university buildings. Jess and Maurice lived beyond the university in a gracious house set well back from the road, screened by trees and a high wall. Though not modern, it was well proportioned, with wide steps to a double doorway surrounded by leaded glass, leading into a square entrance hall where a long staircase window shed plenty of light. Jess had kept the furnishings simple but good, while Maurice had insisted on many of the latest design improvements, including the Ascot water heater from which Sadie filled a luxurious, deep bath.

She soon came down refreshed, having changed into a tailored powder-blue dress with padded shoulders and a neat buckled belt.

‘Better?' Jess was ready with a light teatime snack, served by Grace, a shy, smiling young woman who might easily have stepped from the pages of a fashion magazine, with her beautifully made grey two-piece, a feminine touch of white silk at the collar, showing long, slim legs encased in a good pair of seamed nylon stockings.

‘Much.' Sadie took her niece's hand and gave it a squeeze. ‘You look just like your ma.'

Grace handed her a cup of tea. ‘People say we look like sisters.'

‘The same with you and Meggie, I expect.' Jess didn't want Sadie to think that the house, the car, all the new gadgets put a barrier between them. ‘Now go ahead and tell us what all this is about. I could hardly make you out on the telephone.'

Sadie gave them the full story of Bertie's secretly written letter and their recently aroused suspicions about the Whittakers. Jess and Grace listened attentively, their foreheads furrowed. They wished that Manchester had been free of the threat of air raids so that
they could have taken the boys themselves. Both agreed they must go to Rendal with Sadie the following morning.

Jess's soft heart melted. If only she'd known, she would have driven over to see for herself how they were treated. ‘I know you and your pride, Sadie, but you should have said instead of having all this heartache.'

Sadie blew her nose into her handkerchief. ‘I wanted to give them time to settle in. And we ain't sure yet. Bertie and Geoff might be right as rain for all we know.'

She found herself adopting Walter's cautious role. ‘I've just come up to make sure.'

She went early to bed, with loving hugs and kisses from both Jess and Grace, in a guest room overlooking the back lawn, edged with white and purple lilac trees just coming into blossom. Her bed was wide, the linen smooth and crisp. Yet she couldn‘t sleep; she wondered how Walter and Meggie were managing, of the surprise that lay in store for Bertie and Geoff. Half of her hoped that they would arrive at Rendal and the decision would be a simple one. The boys' obvious misery would remove any doubts. On the other hand, how could she possibly hope that her own sons had in fact been badly treated?

Jess seemed to know what she must be going through. As she passed the door on her own way to bed, she looked in on her sister. ‘You awake?'

‘Wide awake.'

She came in, hair freshly brushed, in a white satin dressing gown, and sat on the edge of Sadie's bed. They talked until the early hours about family, about the war. Sadie realized that just at the point when she hoped soon to have her two boys safely back home, Jess must expect to lose her only son to the glamorous uniform and the dangerous missions of the RAF, Mo's chosen branch, of the armed forces. It made her cry all over again that families should suffer such grief, that young lives should be put at risk and their very futures clouded over by the immense shadows of war.

‘I brought this.' Tommy pulled a half-bottle of whisky from his
pocket and put it by the parchment lamp on Edie's living-room table. Half an hour was long enough for her to have had second, third and fourth thoughts. ‘Dutch courage.'

‘Who for? You or me?' She'd heard him come upstairs, tried to look busy by drawing the curtains and turning on the table lamp.

‘Both. Got any glasses?' He looked round the room. She'd done it out in striped green wallpaper from the shop, with plenty of shiny bronze and chrome finishes on the fender, the mirror frames, the low table for the gramophone.

She watched him size up her home.

‘Who did the wallpapering?'

‘Me.'

‘Not your old man?'

‘He ain't interested. That's fine by me; it means I get to do the choosing.'

‘And the paying?'

She shrugged, handing him two small glasses. She'd changed out of her frock into slacks and a short-sleeved jumper, and let her hair fall loose.

Tommy caught sight of the fading bruises on her upper arm. Somehow it made him want to go very gently. ‘Anyhow, you got a nice place.'

‘Ta.' She offered him a seat beside her on the fawn moquette sofa. They sat like two acquaintances on a works outing, glasses in hand. What had they rushed into, back there at the office?

‘What did you tell Lorna?'

‘Not much. I just said something came up.'

‘Well, she won't be stuck.' He drank and clenched his teeth.

‘No. She said she'd ask Dorothy instead.' Damn. She bit her tongue and glanced away.

‘Well, she'll be game for anything. I'd have thought the pictures a bit tame for her though. What were you going to see?'

‘George Formby in
Trouble Brewing
.'

He looked at her with a grin. ‘Never.'

‘Yes.' She thought about it. ‘Oh, I see, trouble brewing. Yes, I suppose there is.'

There was a silence. ‘Edie—'

‘We could—'

‘What?'

‘No, after you.'

‘There you go again.'

‘What?'

‘You're always so bleeding polite!'

‘Am I?' She blushed. ‘I was going to say we could listen to some music if you liked.'

He breathed a sigh of relief, nodded and watched her as she bent to choose a record and placed the needle carefully on the black disc. It scratched and fuzzed along the outside grooves. ‘Electric?'

‘We're up-to-date, you know. At least electricity isn't on ration yet.'

The music began, a Jack Payne number with the full big-band sound.

‘Do you want to roll back the carpet and dance?' He stood up. ‘Ain't that what he says on the wireless?'

‘I don't mind.' She stood hesitating by the sofa.

‘Let's dance then.' He went and took hold of her. ‘Never mind the carpet, eh?' Once he had an arm around her waist and she rested her hand lightly on his shoulder, he seemed to calm down. ‘You know what I thought you was about to say?'

She listened above the soaring note of the' clarinets. ‘No, when?'

‘I thought you was about to give me my marching orders.'

‘What, when I said we could listen to some music?'

‘Yep. I'm glad you didn't, though.' He was more like his old self, chirpy and confident, as he swung her round and they neatly sidestepped a big armchair.

‘Me too.'

‘Sure?' His grip round her waist tightened.

‘Sure I'm sure.' She was blushing and laughing at him.

‘Sure you're sure you're sure?'

‘Tommy O'Hagan!'

‘Edie Morell.' He murmured her name.

This time she kissed him.

Her bedroom led off from the living room. As the record finished and the needle ground its way towards the middle in a mush of static sound, they steered through the open door. Tommy hugged her to him and leaned on the door to close it. Together they almost overbalanced.

‘Oops.' Upright and separate, she held him at arm's length, running her fingertips down his cheek. ‘What about you? You ain't gonna regret this?'

For answer he closed the gap between them. ‘You're my perfect girl, you know that?' Her smile glowed back at him. ‘You're beautiful, but it ain't that.'

Edie put her arms around his neck. ‘Don't go making me bigheaded, Tommy.'

‘Ain't nobody told you you're beautiful lately?'

‘Oh, yes, I walk down the street and everyone and his aunt stops me to tell me that. What do you think I am?' She began to tease him back.

‘Perfect.' He ran his hands over her back, enjoying the suppleness of her body as she rested her weight against his arms. ‘Anyhow, like I said, being nice looking ain't it. Nice looking girls come ten a penny.'

‘What then?' She kissed him and pulled his tie loose, unfastening the top shirt button.