Chocolate Girls (34 page)

‘Oh,’ Edie handed the letter back. ‘What a lovely kind lady.’

Frances was frowning slightly. ‘They sound a very nice couple,’ she said sadly. ‘But, Ruby, they don’t know about Greta, do they? They don’t realize they have a grandchild over here?’

‘Well, no.’ Ruby blushed. ‘Thing is, Mrs Hatton, I didn’t know what sort of reception I was going to get, did I? Now they’ve written me such a nice, kind letter I’ll write back and tell them. They sound lovely people.’ She swallowed, eyes shining with tears. ‘Just like Wally.’

November 1954

Janet closed the door of the doctor’s surgery behind her and went out into the darkness of Vicarage Road, hurrying until she reached the park. She walked hurriedly across the grass, not caring about the mud on her shoes. Beyond the fringe of light from the road she stopped, and allowed the sobs to come, releasing some of her pent-up grief. She had fought grimly against crying in front of the doctor. But now it didn’t matter if anyone heard and she was too distraught to care.

Dr Aitchison’s final, dismissive words were burned into her mind.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Ferris.’ He spoke in a clipped, almost hostile way, as if giving bad news kindly would have cost him too much effort. ‘There’s nothing more I can do. I think after all this time we’ll have to accept the fact that you’re infertile. You’ll just have to keep busy and find other ways to fill your life.’

But I’m not infertile! she screamed in her head. It was the one thing she could not tell them, any of them. That time with Alec: the miscarriage. She had been pregnant and she lost a baby! Until her marriage she had buried all thoughts of that time. She had never even told Edie about it. Of course, she was ashamed, but it was more than that. It had never seemed entirely real. It was more like a bad dream from which she had woken and the baby was no more. She had closed her mind to the reality of it. But now, oh, the pain of remembering was real now all right.

It was true that some women could never bring a child to term. She knew that from years of living with a doctor and hearing him discuss such things, but with Martin she had never even conceived. She knew
she
was capable of conceiving a child, but no one seemed interested in whether Martin, a fellow doctor, could give her one. The problem was always assumed to lie with her, and it had barely occurred even to her that it might not, until Frances said quietly one day, ‘Of course, a man can have problems as well . . .’ And things fell into place.

She stood for a long time on the damp grass, barely noticing the cold, until she was calmer. A man walked past near her with his dog and she saw that she must look peculiar standing there alone in the dark.

I must get home and get the supper on, she thought dismally. Although goodness knows what time Martin’ll be in to eat it.

For two years after she and Martin were married she had given up her job, taking it for granted that soon she would be busy with a family. When the children she longed for failed to arrive she decided it was no good moping about it at home, filling her time with curtain-making and bits of voluntary work. If she went back to Cadbury’s and took her mind off it, she reasoned, the babies would follow. She had been too tense and upset – that was no state in which to create new life. So she had gladly returned to something like her old routine, and the tennis club, happy to be busy, to have company and a sense of purpose. But still she had borne no children.

Reaching home, she lit the oven and put in the crock of steak and kidney casserole she had made the day before. The potatoes could wait ’til later. She sat on the old Indian rug in the sitting-room, twisting sheets of newspaper in her hands to lay in the grate, sighing as she remembered the happy expectation with which she and Martin had moved into the house. She remembered something Edie had said to her recently about the day the war ended and how she’d felt.

‘Thing was, I was happy, like everyone else. But suddenly everything felt really bleak and
frightening
. All that time I’d had you and Frances and Davey, all safe together and not much choice about what we did because of the war. And now it was all going to break up and we’d have more freedom and have to start deciding things for ourselves again. I felt terrible that day, even though it was the best day ever.’

As it turned out, Edie’s fears had not been realized. Janet knew she had been frightened of someone coming to find Davey, a father in the services perhaps, or an uncle. But months passed, the servicemen trickled home, the prisoners of war, and still no one came, even though her name was recorded with local doctors and the police. Frances had gladly let her stay on as a lodger, especially with Janet marrying. She said it would be like losing two daughters at once if they both went.

Janet hadn’t felt the fear then, the flatness. She was caught up in the atmosphere of street parties and rippling strings of Union Jacks and Welcome Home banners across the streets, as she waited for her turn. All she could think of was Martin coming home.

He was given early release from the army in early 1946, on grounds of ill health. Remembering that first sight she had had of him always stirred up the feelings again, the passion, yet the pity of it. It was a grey, freezing day in February when they met on New Street Station. She had not wanted him to come to the house. Not at first. She waited on the platform in the best clothes she had been able to scrape together in those austere times, a straight navy skirt and home-knitted pink twinset, her old camel coat and a handbag over her arm. The train was so late she began to believe he would never come. When she saw him at last, in those split seconds her understanding fought to catch up with the evidence in front of her eyes. It wasn’t that she didn’t recognize him – his height, his face, were too distinctive for her to mistake him for anyone else. But he was transformed. She saw a gaunt man dressed in civvies which hung several sizes too loose on him, skin stained a sickly yellow, a face old beyond its years. Janet felt her knees go weak at the sight of him, her emotions a mixture of joy, tenderness and also a kind of dread. His sickness had drawn his face in, emphasizing the full mouth, making his nose appear almost like the beak of a bird of prey. He looked temporarily alien, almost grotesque. But his eyes lit with emotion at the sight of her. For a moment they just stood in front of each other without speaking. Then he reached out and touched her cheek. Full of tenderness she held out her arms, the sight of him blurred by her tears. The long, lonely months and years, the shameful thought of Alec, none of that mattered now. It was past. ‘Thank you for coming back to me,’ she sobbed, as they clung to each other.

Later, he told her, ‘I saw so many chaps after they’d had a “Dear John . . .” letter from home. Terrible, when you’re out there. I can’t describe it. I don’t know what I would have done . . . You’re what kept me going, my love.’

The early years of their marriage had been spent in adjustment. Martin was very keen to marry as soon as possible and the wedding took place in June 1946. Over the next years he flung himself with almost obsessive enthusiasm into the birth pangs of the new National Health Service. He worked punishingly long hours, even when he was not well himself, and often came home with stories of the people who had come to him with health problems neglected for years.

‘It’s absolutely incredible what some people have put up with!’ he would exclaim. He was passionate about the NHS, about getting help and care to the poorest. He knew his work was worthwhile. But behind all the frenetic activity, Janet knew he was profoundly unsettled. The yellow from the jaundice and mepacrine tablets faded, but his inner turmoil remained. Once he did allow himself some free time, he couldn’t sit for long, or relax. Couldn’t allow himself just to be. And sometimes his temper flared and he said cruel things about which he was pathetically contrite afterwards. At the beginning she had found a deep, unexpected well of patience within herself. He wouldn’t talk in any detail about what they’d experienced during the siege at Imphal, surrounded by the Japanese, barely eating and working in a field hospital day and night in conditions Martin said he could barely begin to describe. In those early years she had not worried so much about the lack of a child, thinking that perhaps Martin would be under par for some time after all his illness. And they needed to spend time together on their own, getting to know one another properly. She was understanding, careful with him. Their lovemaking had been passionate, easily overcoming the initial clumsiness. At times it was very tender. She was deeply moved when he cried in his sleep, tormented by dreams, then half waking, reached out for her, moving his hands hungrily over her as if desperate for warmth and comfort. But there had been times also when he was very distant, closed in on himself, and he did not touch her for days and nights at a time.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said one day, when they had been married for almost two years. He was standing by the window at the back of the house and she could only see him in silhouette. Things had flared up between them over something trivial – the state the garden was in – when they both knew the row was really about the fact she still wasn’t pregnant. He kept saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ He turned his back on her and stared out. ‘I’m trying to settle. Should be through it by now, I know. Civilian life is so different. So small and . . . stifling after all we went through.’

The word ‘stifling’ cut her deeply. He wasn’t happy with her: he found their life petty and stifling!

‘I’ve become hard in a way I don’t like. I’m ashamed of it.’ He turned to her. ‘Please, darling, don’t get upset. I hate myself for making you unhappy.’

Tears came to her eyes again as she knelt by the fire, thinking of that day. It was then that she had decided to go to work again. Staying at home alone was too unbearable. To everyone else they seemed settled, Martin developing a fine career as a doctor. It was only to Edie that Janet confided how much they were struggling, and Edie told Ruby some of it.

‘Sod’s law, isn’t it?’ Ruby said sympathetically. ‘I get pregnant at the drop of a trouserleg with no husband and poor old Janet’s having no luck when she could give a child everything it needed. It’s not fair. I wish there was something we could do to help.’

It was over the past three years that she had truly begun to despair. Martin seemed more and more distant. She sat trying to think when they had last made love. He was always so tired. She felt at the lowest ebb she could remember. Her marriage seemed to stretch in front of her like a white track across a desert, isolated, unpeopled by anyone she could be really close to. Terrible thoughts came to her sometimes. What if she were to go and find Alec and persuade him to give her a child? Pass it off as Martin’s? Or some other man? Someone who could help her ease the lonely ache inside her. She was appalled at herself for thinking this way. And what made it all the worse was that she knew Martin was suffering too, and they just couldn’t seem to reach each other.

That night, laying kindling and some small knobs of coal in the grate, she felt so low, so worthless as a woman. She couldn’t have children, couldn’t seem to make her husband happy. She had always felt sorry for Edie, bless her, but even Edie seemed better off than her now. At least she had David, whom she adored. And she never seemed interested in marriage: there’d been quite a few interested in her over the years, but Edie just brushed them aside. It was only David who mattered. Janet scraped a match viciously along the box and lit the fire. The paper blackened, shrivelled, glowing at the edges, and she watched, trying to reach a place of calm inside. She needed to get the potatoes on, but Martin was bound to be late. He seemed to live on half-burnt dinners. She wasn’t a great success at that side of things either, though Martin never complained.

A moment later the front door opened and she jumped violently. Disorientated for a moment, she wondered whether she’d dozed off in front of the fire and it was now nine or ten o’clock. But the clock said only ten to seven.

‘Janet?’

He came in, blowing on his hands, his nose pink with cold, coat still on, flapping open. ‘Ah good, a fire. It’s freezing out.’

‘You’re home early,’ she said cautiously. ‘I’m afraid the supper’s not quite ready.’

‘That’s all right – never mind.’ He took his coat off, flung it over a chair and stood with his hands on his hips, staring at her for a moment, as if gauging her mood. She wondered if he could tell she had been crying, but he didn’t appear to notice. And there was something new in his face.

‘Look, Jan. I – I just . . .’ He shrugged, a large, helpless gesture. ‘I can’t go on like this.’

She looked him full in the eyes. Face it. You have to face it, she told herself, taking a deep, desperate breath. ‘You mean . . . our marriage?’

‘What?
No
, darling!’ He swooped down to kneel on the floor beside her. ‘No, no, no . . .! Oh God, Janet, it’s not you. I mean I know things have been difficult and we can’t – I mean let’s face it, we’re not going to have children.’

Something tightened inside her, as if her very being flinched, even more than when Dr Aitchison had said it. It was the first time he had ever fully acknowledged what had become so cruelly obvious.

‘But it’s not that. I’ve come home early to tell you something, or rather, ask you. There’s a job I could take, an offer from someone Jonathan knows – in Africa. The Belgian Congo. We could both go – have a new start, wider horizons . . .’