Coronation Wives (56 page)

‘You won’t be needing anything,’ he said, grinning wickedly as his fingers pulled at the buttons of her jacket. ‘Nothing at all.’

Polly was frightened. Thoughts of passion were squashed dead. She had to get out of this, wait for the opportunity, but until then, she had to play a part.

She covered his hands with her own and smiled as coquettishly as she knew how. ‘Now come on, darlin’. Ain’t the best things worth waiting for?’

His scowl deepened. ‘No!’

Polly knew when not to protest and when she was in danger. She went along with it, smiling as though she was really looking forward to him stripping her naked and thrusting his equally naked body against hers.

He pulled her jacket and blouse away from her shoulders, down to her elbows so that her arms were pinioned at her sides. ‘I’m going to have you here.’

‘On the stairs?’

‘Why not?’

His mouth bit into the soft flesh between her shoulder and her neck and it hurt. Polly bit her lip and closed her eyes. This was not what she wanted and certainly not what she’d expected. How the hell could she get out of it?

He pushed her back onto the stairs, fell on top of her and used the vilest language possible to describe what he intended doing to her. Polly squeezed her eyes shut and wished and hoped for another guardian angel like the one who’d come crashing into Griffiths’s place armed only with a hockey stick and the bus fare home.

Mickey’s hands were under her skirt, tearing at her underwear, pushing her legs apart.

‘It hurts,’ she shouted referring to the stair riser that was digging into her back.

‘Not so much as …’

Everything stopped as a heavy banging echoed through the house. Someone sounded determined to get in.

Ginger’s self-satisfied smirk had been replaced with confusion. He looked up at Mickey for guidance.

‘Answer it.’

Mickey’s weight pinned her down. Like him she watched Ginger make his way to the front door and prayed that the police were on the other side of it.

Ginger sounded surprised. ‘What the hell do you want?’

‘My wife!’

Billy came charging towards the staircase, his thin face creased with anger and his fists clenched as big as he could get them.

Polly struggled. Mickey laughed and pressed her tighter against the stairs.

‘Let him see you. Let him see what a tart you are!’

Polly screamed as Ginger landed a blow on Billy that sent him flat onto his back. Billy might be streetwise, but he was certainly no fighter and she could tell from Ginger’s grin that he knew it too.

The grin was wiped off his face as thick arms pulled his behind his back, spun him round and with one powerful punch sent him flying across the room, crashing into the circular drinks cabinet which toppled and fell forward spilling glass, drinks and paperwork all over him.

‘Ivan!’

Mickey glared, then raised a fist. ‘Stupid broad! I should have known better!’

The Irish accent had disappeared. In that split instant before the fist fell on her she saw the man he truly was, the US sergeant who had treated her with callous contempt because she’d been involved with a coloured GI.

Ivan did not get there in time to stop the first blow, but he did stop any more from falling. Mickey had spent his war years as a prison guard, or in stores, transport or catering. Never had he braved battlefields, lived in wild places and built up the muscles of a hunted man. Ivan was stronger and more agile than him and held him in a stranglehold until the men in blue arrived to clean things up.

‘Is she all right?’ Ivan asked Janet when everything was over and Polly was lying side by side with her husband.

‘Oh yes.’

‘Polly’s too tough for the likes of Mickey Noble to damage,’ said Charlotte as she applied a cold compress to Polly’s jaw.

When Polly was at home recovering, the police came round to say that they’d got all the information they needed to send Mickey Noble back to America to face justice, thanks to Billy. Janet and Ivan arrived just after they’d left. Things were busy at the factory and Ivan had been delegated the task of offering Billy a job.

‘He’s out at the moment,’ said Polly, who was draped over the settee eating chocolate misshapes from a brown paper bag. Magazines trailed from her lap, along the back of the settee and onto the floor. Some of them looked like Christmas issues, most seemed out of date. ‘Nice of you to take a day off work to come and see me,’ she said to Janet.

‘I’ve left the job at the sanatorium. I don’t want to be a secretary any more.’

Polly raised her eyebrows. ‘Don’t it pay well?’

‘Not too bad,’ said Janet, ‘but I think I’ve found my vocation in life.’

Polly grinned and looked meaningfully at Ivan. ‘Oh yeah?’

Janet and Ivan exchanged looks of mutual understanding.

‘Alas,’ said Ivan and shrugged sadly, but all the time he smiled.

Janet laughed. ‘You’re a wonderful man, Ivan Bronowsky.’ She took his hand and squeezed it tight. ‘But that isn’t exactly what I meant.’ Her expression turned serious. ‘I’ve decided to look into becoming a doctor. If I can’t do that I will do something similar to what my mother’s been doing all these years, something more worthwhile than taking down notes and typing out reports. I will be helping Mother for a while. She doesn’t show it, but she’s not really got over Father’s death.’

When Ivan excused himself to use the bathroom, Polly leaned closer to Janet and softly asked, ‘Billy didn’t see me and Mickey – you know – doing anything, did he?’ All the cockiness was gone. She looked really concerned.

‘Billy was out cold and my mother explained that she’d asked you to gain his confidence and get evidence against him. So in fact you’re something of a heroine.’

Polly looked embarrassed. ‘More like a bloody fool.’

Janet sighed. ‘We’ve all been that in our time.’ It occurred to her then just how much she had in common with her mother’s generation. ‘I wonder why we fear to be less than perfect?’

Polly slapped her on the shoulder. ‘’Cos it’s the truth. We’re all human!’

It was easy to grin, to be pleased that Polly was again the buxom blonde with a winning smile, a playful look in her eyes and a tart remark on her lips.

Blustering into the house like a whirlwind, Carol kicked the carpet aside and scattered piles of newspapers from off the arm of the chair. She was waving a piece of paper in her hand. ‘Sean’s sent me a love letter,’ she shouted, then flung her arms around her mother’s neck so that the piece of paper, which looked like the rough stuff the butcher used to wrap sausages, fluttered under her mother’s nose.

Polly laughed, a loud raucous sound that only a mature woman of her particular character could get away with. She patted Carol’s hand. ‘You’ll get plenty more of them in yer time, my girl.’ She glanced at the paper and wrinkled her nose. ‘It smells offish.’

Ah, thought Janet wryly. I was wrong. It wasn’t the butcher.

‘I’m going to write him one back,’ said Carol, her head cocked to one side, a cheeky look that she’d inherited from her mother. ‘I’m good at writing letters.’

‘So I hear,’ said Polly wryly, turned to Janet and said, ‘Do you know what she wrote to Billy?’

‘Only if you want to tell me.’

Polly dug her elbow into Carol’s side. ‘Go on then. Tell her.’

Carol tossed her blonde plaits and their tired white bows back from her shoulders. ‘I said that mum was like a lonely princess and a lot of wicked wizards were out to get her.’

Janet nodded approvingly. ‘You have a wonderful imagination.’

Carol went on. ‘And then I told him about them men I belted with my hockey stick.’

Janet raised her eyebrows and looked to Polly for an explanation and was almost disappointed that Ivan chose that exact moment to return.

Polly grinned and hugged Carol close. ‘She told Billy what I was afraid to tell him.’ She explained a little further. ‘If he’d known that the heavy mob had been round, he’d have shopped them sooner, but I was annoyed with ’im. We couldn’t go to Australia, you see, not with ’is record.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘Bloody sod! He’d let me down. I thought he deserved to stay there a while.’

When Billy finally came in, Ivan put it to him about the job. Billy began shaking his head, though his eyes were locked with those of his wife.

‘It all depends,’ he began and shifted nervously from one foot to another.

Sensing that an explanation was in order, everyone looked at everyone else. After pinching a chocolate from the brown paper bag, it was Carol who burst the bubble.

‘We’re going to Canada!’

Polly beamed from ear to ear. ‘It’s true. They don’t mind a bit of form and Aunty Meg can come too, especially since she had that win on the pools. It ain’t much, but enough to keep
her over there.’ She threw Billy an accusing look. ‘And he can take that job with Colin while we’re waiting for things to ’appen. It’ll keep him out of mischief.’

Thinking of Polly, her lifestyle and her attitude in general made Janet burst out laughing as she dropped the car into first gear to get to the top of Park Street. ‘Polly is unbelievable. It’s pretty obvious that she has been more than a little naughty whilst Billy was in prison, yet still he’s going along with her plans. Did you see the way he looked at her? He can’t seem to make a move without her. And he must know that she’s less than perfect.’

‘Like we all are.’

The quiet implication in Ivan’s statement was not lost on her. Earlier she had spoken to Polly along those very same lines. You didn’t love people because they were perfect; you loved them despite their imperfections.

Ivan confirmed it. ‘He loves her.’

Meg and Bridget were out the back, supposedly taking in washing, but now gossiping over the garden fence. Billy was in the lavatory reading an excerpt from the
Evening Post
that was hung on a string from the cistern – or at least trying to. An official prison visitor, a parson in fact, had helped him with his reading and writing and he’d been practising the skill in private. He wanted to surprise Polly, to show her he could be something better than he was. There was a bit of mending to do between them, but nothing that couldn’t be got over. Going to Canada wasn’t really to his liking. Neither was working for Colin, but he’d go along with anything for now so they could continue as a family. Their less than perfect relationship, in a less than perfect world, must not fall apart.

The window was open and as he stumbled his way through the words, breaking them down into smaller, more manageable syllables, he could hear Meg speaking quite plainly.

‘So there you are, Bridget. They can’t go to Australia now, thank God.’

Bridget started to laugh, though cackle might be a better description. ‘You’re a wicked one. Chucking their post in the bin.’

‘I don’t care. I couldn’t let them go, not without me.’

‘Did your Polly suspect anything?’

‘Yeah! That them Australian people ’ad forgot to post the stuff to her. She wrote to them about three times, and she never looked in the ashbin. If she had she would have seen ’em there.’

‘And now yer goin’ to Canada.’

‘Yeah!’ said Meg and sounded supremely satisfied. ‘They don’t mind dependants, especially if they’ve got a little nest egg. That little win on the pools made all the difference. And then Billy’s bit of form got squashed – or almost. Anyway, it’s not enough for them to worry about. He ain’t going to rob a bank, is he?’

He heard a throaty sound, then Bridget said, ‘’Ere you are. A new penny. I’ve spat on it for luck.’

He winced at the sound of the gummy old woman spitting. If Meg hadn’t had the win, he’d have got out of going to Canada just by telling Meg about it and making Polly feel guilty. He’d been worrying about finding a way out of it for ages. Now it looked as though one had been presented to him.

Still sitting on the lavatory, Billy was no longer trying to work out the words on the piece of newspaper. After hearing Meg’s confession, his mind was working overtime. If he took the job with Colin he’d be up before everyone else, just after the postman came. The paperwork would come in an envelope marked Canada House and he would be there waiting for it, but he’d have to be able to recognize it.

House was a word he knew. Soundlessly he formed the syllables CAN.A.DA.

Charlotte paced the upstairs drawing room. The doors to the veranda were open wide to let in the unique air of the third week in May. Was it Milton who had said something about the third week in May being as close to the Garden of Eden or Paradise as you were likely to get on earth? She shook her head. She couldn’t remember.

She walked out onto the veranda, leaned on the ornate ironwork, sighed at the garden and walked back in again.

Janet sat in a chintz easy chair with a magazine she wasn’t reading. Her mother’s nervous pacing was too distracting. ‘Mother, those shoes are going to the cobbler’s very shortly.’

Charlotte stopped and looked down at her shoes. ‘Surely not. There’s nothing wrong with them.’

‘There will be if you keep pacing backwards and forwards. You’ll wear holes in them and you’re making me dizzy.’

Charlotte sighed and looked at her watch. ‘I can’t help it. It’s been such a long time. I don’t know how Edna’s going to take it. Colin’s prepared her, but I don’t know how she’ll be. I don’t know how I’ll be.’

Janet watched as her mother’s gaze drifted back to the garden. It took on such a panoramic vista when viewed from the first floor. Down on the ground floor the surrounding
heights of other terraced crescents seemed to crowd it.

Janet got up from the chair and stood beside her. ‘How’s Colin taking it?’

‘It was entirely his idea, you know. I just think he’s a man in a million. Apparently it was something Ivan said to him, after he’d inadvertently opened the letter from Josef.’

‘So you said.’

Her mother had told her the same thing a number of times during the past few weeks. She sensed her unease. Had she done the right thing? ‘Whatever was said, it must have been pretty awesome.’

‘Or heartfelt.’

They fell to silence before Janet said, ‘Now listen. You don’t have to come in. I can handle everything. I know I can. As long as you’re sure that you don’t want to see him – Josef I mean. But I do know he means a lot to you.’