Joy and Josephine (54 page)

Joy swallowed and thought hard, taking this in. ‘You mean,’ she said, ‘my headache doesn’t prove I’m Kathleen Tissot – God, what a detestable name! I’ve always hated it.’ She suddenly caught sight of his watch. ‘Golly, look at the time! The bar should have been opened hours ago. She’ll be livid.’ Then a beaming smile broke over her face like a sunlit wave. ‘But what do I care? It’s none of my business any more. They’ll be all right. They’ll go to the South of Ireland and eat ham. Old Daddy Tissot, he won’t mind. He’s happy anywhere as long as he’s left in peace and quiet.’

‘Fat chance of that in Southern Ireland,’ Wilfred said, as they got up.

When they parted outside the station, he said: ‘You will write, won’t you? We pick up letters pretty often, even when we are at sea.’

‘Of course. Oh, Wilf, do take care of yourself.’ He was just the sort of person who got killed in a war. She had a dreadful feeling about him.

‘You bet,’ he said. ‘See you on my next leave. Get away from that woman as soon as you can and let me know where you are. Where will you go, anyway?’

Where would she go? It depends who I am, she thought, but she did not know who she was. Who would have her? Norman would, but she was not going near him again. Not Archie; that was all over, and anyway, she was still a Roman Catholic. She would have gone to Alexander, but he had chosen to go and look after Rodney in Canada, for the sake of getting his child out there.

‘Where will you go?’ repeated Wilfred, leaning forward to peer at her in the blackness of Charing Cross Road.

He dimly saw her. ‘To my Mum, of course.’

‘But
I thought you were leaving the pub – ’

‘I am. I mean my Mum. My Mum Abinger, in the Lane.’

The siren was wailing as Jo lugged two heavy cases down the pitch-dark Portobello Road. She found Mrs Abinger
preparing to spend the night blanketed in her armchair, for she never went to bed, she said, when there were coogle bombs about.

‘Where arc the others?’ Jo asked. ‘You don’t mean they go to Ellison’s shelter and leave you up here alone? Come on, I’ll take you down.’

‘No, no, my dear. I’d rather stay here. I’m such an awkward body to get up and down steps. You go on home, there’s a good girl, before it gets too bad.’

‘I am home,’ said Jo, slinging off her hat, ‘for good.’

So they were together when the doodlebug hit the back of Ellison’s and the Corner Stores rocked like a mad thing and survived. It was morning before the policeman came up with something for them to identify.

Mrs Abinger, still stupefied, sat looking for a long time at the large Homburg hat and the baby-blue crochet scarf. ‘Poor George,’ she said at last, ‘he always said the Corner Stores would stand long after Ellison’s had crumbled. I hope he knows, wherever he is. He’d be so pleased to think that he was right.’

She had to be got out of London. She remembered Bolt Bay, and Jo went down there and found a furnished cottage on the harbour.

‘It’s my Mum,’ she pleaded to the Works Manager, and cried a little in his office.

He let her go. ‘But they’ll be after you,’ he said. ‘The Ministry of Labour won’t care about your Mum.’

She planned to find war work in Devonshire. Mrs Abinger, installed as snug as a cat in the tiny cobbled cottage with oil lamps, a pump for the water and an open range for cooking, was perfectly happy pottering about all day like a pensioner in an almshouse. She had no stairs to climb and when it was fine, she took to gardening, with long-handled tools so that she did not have to stoop. She put potted plants along all the window-sills and kept a kettle always just off the boil at the back of the range. As she stood at her doorway in the evening sun, watching for Jo with her hands folded under a clean
flowered apron, she looked just like an illustration from Beatrix Potter.

Jo went every day to help in the Service hospital along the cliff. It was a group of huts with no proper garden, but some seats had been put in a corner of the enclosure that overlooked the sea, and it was there that the convalescents and walking patients idled and fretted away the sunny afternoons. Jo went out one evening to call a patient in for treatment and found him talking to a boy in a white submarine jersey. She knew who it was from the back of his head long before she reached the beach.

Billy had two legs wounds and had nearly lost his foot. He would be here for several weeks yet. They could see each other every day and he would be allowed to come out to the cottage for supper as often as he liked.

That evening, instead of going straight home, she climbed the steep lane, crossed the road, and went through the churchyard to St Joseph’s. She stopped in the porch as she always did, wondering if she had ever lain swaddled there. Joy or Josephine? She would probably never know, but it didn’t seem to matter. She was herself. And Billy was coming to supper to-morrow.

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

Copyright © 1948 by Monica Dickens

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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ISBN: 9781448206667
eISBN: 9781448206308

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