Room for a Stranger (7 page)

The girls played jacks. Doreen tossed the pieces, caught three on the back of her hand, tossed again, and picked up one while the other was in the air. She was deft at this, and her turn lasted a long time. When June took over the pieces Doreen moved back, and overheard her mother saying, “…a bit of a tiff…”

She's talking about me and Rhoda, Doreen thought.

Mum and Mrs Lee spoke in low voices, their heads close together. Doreen listened.

“…never a word from her … returned marked ‘gone away'…”

“You'd think she'd get in touch.”

“…nothing new. Miss Wingfield says she never visited … only child … must be an encumbrance…”

“It makes you wonder…”

The voices sank lower, but Doreen caught the words “father” and “unsettled”, and “drifting”.

Mum leaned back and her voice came more clearly. “Well, it's not for us to criticize, but…”

“Doreen!” Barbara interrupted. “It's your turn again.”

Rhoda and Lennie came home at six o'clock, sunburnt and tired.

Lennie said, “We went right over to Wendon.”

“You must be starving,” said Mum.

Rhoda chatted to Mum as they got the dinner; she avoided Doreen's eye.

Later, upstairs in their room, Doreen said, “We did that show – in case you're interested.”

Rhoda went pink. “Did it go well?”

“Great. Everyone enjoyed it. We made eight and twopence.” She would have liked to share with Rhoda the fun that her cat-pie idea had created and tell her which songs she'd sung, but she couldn't; she and Rhoda might be on speaking terms but they weren't friends.

Rhoda fiddled with her hair slide. She said, “I'm sorry I let you down.”

“I suppose Mum told you to say that?”

Rhoda turned with a flash of anger. “Look, I've said I'm sorry.”

“It's OK,” said Doreen. “We didn't need you.”

“I'm going to Aunty Elsie's after mass,” said Rhoda. “Do you want to come too?”

She spoke from behind the screen. It was a week since their quarrel, but Doreen still wanted the screen in place. She was determined to stay angry with Rhoda.

“I'm not bothered,” she said.

Rhoda's bedsprings creaked as she sat up. She'd be unpinning her hair and brushing it into curls. “I'm taking the babies out if it's fine. Their mams said I could.”

Doreen wanted to go. She wanted to push the babies out in the second-hand pram the WVS had provided. She wanted to see Aunty Elsie and be made a fuss of. But Rhoda was trying to get round her, and she wasn't having it.

She got up. Behind the blackout curtain she could hear rain pattering. All week the weather had been wet and cold, trapping them indoors. She and Rhoda had been unable to avoid each other. Doreen had taken to reading more than usual, partly because she liked reading, but also because it was a way of shutting Rhoda out. She had noticed that Rhoda never read books. When Doreen and Lennie were both reading, Rhoda would pace about restlessly, trying to catch the eye of one of them, eager to break in and talk.

Rhoda went off early to church, wearing the blue raincoat Mum had bought for her at the WI jumble sale. Anne-Marie still hadn't sent any money for clothes, and there had been no reply to Mum's letter, not even a postcard.

Doreen remembered Rhoda's collection of postcards. They had looked at them all one evening, not long after she first came, and Doreen had been fascinated by the photographs of different towns and the romantic-sounding postmarks: Blackpool, Southport, Colwyn Bay, Rhyl. There was never much written on the back: “Lovely audiences, mainly servicemen, full houses”; and once, back in May, “Bombing all night. Fires, searchlights, sirens. You should see the bags under my eyes! Hope you're being a good girl. Love and kisses, M.”

“She puts
M
,” Rhoda had said. “She doesn't like ‘Mam'.”

For the first time Doreen wondered whether Rhoda minded about her mother not writing. I'd mind, she thought. But perhaps it was different if your mother was famous.

And other people wrote to Rhoda: Sister Ursula, from her old school, and Bernadette O'Farrell, who did Anne-Marie's dressmaking. Not Rhoda's boyfriend, though.

“Mum,” she said, “Rhoda's boyfriend never writes to her.”

Mum was filling the copper and sorting the dirty washing into heaps on the floor.

“If she's got a boyfriend,” she said.

“She has! I told you: he's twenty-two and he used to live next door to them in Anfield and he's in the army.”

“Oh, I'm sure he exists,” agreed Mum. “I just wonder…you mustn't take everything Rhoda says literally. I mean, he may not think of her as his girlfriend.”

Doreen was puzzled. Rhoda had been so positive.

“Perhaps his letters aren't getting through,” she said. But Jim, Phyl's husband, was in the army, and Phyl was always getting letters from him.

Mum put the wireless on. It was time for the Sunday Service and she liked the hymns.

“O worship the King all-glorious above;

O gratefully sing His power and His love…”

They both joined in.

Doreen wanted to smile and sing at the same time. She was happy; she had Mum to herself and they were singing together again.

When the prayers started she said, “Let's practise your songs for the concert.”

Rehearsals for the concert were already underway, with the church hall booked for the sixth of September. Mum was planning to sing “It's a Lovely Day Tomorrow” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. She switched the wireless off and they began.

“I
wish
I could be in the concert too,” said Doreen.

She longed to be part of it all. Mum would be singing, Aunty Elsie playing the piano, and she wanted nothing so much as to be up there with them on the stage. She'd wear her Sunday dress and Rhoda's black patent shoes, and perhaps Phyl would lend her that hair slide with the twinkly bits…

Mum was sympathetic. “But Miss Forrest says if she starts letting children in she'll get all the little ones. She wants it to be professional.”

“I am
quite
professional,” said Doreen.

At dinner-time Rhoda came in, wet through, her hair in rats' tails. She hadn't been able to take the babies out. Doreen was glad.

It rained all day. After dinner Lennie went to the pigeon loft and Rhoda turned to Doreen. “Do you want to play something? Chess?”

Doreen liked chess, and Rhoda knew it.

“It's OK,” said Doreen. “I told Rosie she could come round.”

It wasn't true, but, having said it, Doreen felt obliged to make it true. She endured an afternoon with Rosie, playing snakes and ladders because Rosie wasn't clever enough for chess. Rhoda went out to the loft to talk to Lennie, and later Doreen heard her chatting and laughing with Mum upstairs as they put clean sheets on the bed. She wondered, jealously, what they were finding to talk about.

Rosie, once in, was always difficult to get rid of; but Doreen was ruthless. “You'll have to go now – we're having our tea.”

Rosie wiped her hand across her nose. “I can stay to tea.”

“No, you can't.”

She hustled Rosie out into the yard.

“We could have given Rosie a bit of tea,” Mum said later.

“I don't want her here.”

“You shouldn't ask her round, then.”

Doreen didn't reply. She suspected that Mum knew why she had asked Rosie round.

Rhoda was still upstairs.

Mum said, “Rhoda went to confession last week.”

Doreen shrugged.

“I think she's really sorry for what she did.”

“I wish it would stop raining,” said Doreen. “Then I could get away from certain people.”

Doreen's wish was granted. The rain eased on Monday, and for the next week or so it was fine enough between showers to stretch a skipping rope across the street or go to the woods with Barbara and June and, sometimes, Rosie.

Rhoda didn't come. Doreen had rejected all her overtures of friendship and Rhoda seemed at last to have taken the hint. She stayed at home and cooked, or did things to her hair, or went to Aunty Elsie's.

Doreen's gang – she thought of it as her gang, although June was a rival leader – roamed the woods, playing P.P. or A.R.A.; all their games were known by initials, like the Services and the programmes on the wireless.

There were other gangs in the woods. The boys were mostly involved in battles: Brummie evacuees versus Scousers, with the locals divided between them; or Scousers and Brummies in a brief alliance waging war on the locals. The boys swung from trees, stalked each other, laid ambushes, but few of the battles were ferocious.

The girls didn't go in for battles, but they had their own ways of making war. June got fed up with Rosie and tried to make her go home, but Doreen always became protective if anyone else bullied Rosie. “Leave her alone,” she said. “She can come if she likes.” And Barbara backed her up.

“She's dim and she's snotty,” said June when Rosie was out of earshot.

“I know,” said Doreen, “but she can't help it.”

She felt a responsibility for Rosie because she lived next door and they had known each other all their lives.

June fell out with Doreen and attached herself to a group of tough girls led by Joyce Revell. Doreen was afraid of them. Joyce's gang took to following Doreen's and yelling abuse or charging in and breaking up their games.

There was a constant struggle among the Culverton children for use of the Dungeon. It was the best place in Old Works. The boys often took it over, but sometimes Joyce's gang drove them off. If Doreen and her friends got there first, Joyce's gang would come up the back way onto the broken roof and shout insults and shower them with twigs and pine cones.

Graffiti appeared on the wall of the Dungeon:

“D.D. IS STUCK UP.”

“DOREEN L. SNOT-FACE.”

It was a shock, seeing her own name. Doreen felt humiliated, even a bit scared. She remembered a rhyme Dad used to say:

It wasn't true. Words were the worst.

She pretended not to care. “Stupid nits.”

“What does it say?” asked Rosie. She couldn't read much.

“Nothing,” Barbara said quickly.

“They needn't think we're scared,” said Doreen.

But they were. Lennie told Doreen about a ruined cottage in the woods off Love Lane; they'd try going there, Doreen thought.

In the end there was no need to move. A scheme was organized to get children onto neighbouring farms to help with the harvest, but you had to be twelve or over. So Rhoda went, and Joyce Revell, and most of her friends; June was left without a gang and tried to get back into Doreen's but they drove her off.

Suddenly the weather worsened. There were thunderstorms day after day, and rain that could soak you in seconds. The harvest was abandoned; the woods emptied of children. Doreen read
The Call of the Wild
and then started on
Little Women
. Rhoda went to Aunty Elsie's to help with the costumes.

Like the weather, Rhoda changed. She seemed nervous and edgy – “funny”, as Doreen put it.

“It's the thunder,” said Mum. “Gives you headaches.”

But it wasn't that.

On the Saturday before they went back to school Phyl came round with her baby, Ian. She often came when Mum was off work, and would sit and drink tea and complain about living with her mother-in-law.

Doreen and Rhoda put aside their differences for a while and played with Ian. He was not quite walking, and they encouraged him to stagger between them as they knelt on the hearth-rug with outstretched arms.

Phyl was deep in conversation with Mum. Doreen half-listened, as she always did when grown-ups were talking. “And another thing, Mum, she goes on at me if I want to go out of an evening. I'd like to go out with my friends from work – I miss work – but she thinks I should just stay in every night and write to Jim.”

“Well, you'll come to our concert, won't you, next Saturday? See your old mum making a fool of herself?”

“You'll be the best, Mum!” insisted Phyl. “And don't worry, I won't let her stop me coming to that.” She turned to the two girls on the hearth-rug. “You're in it, too, aren't you, Rhoda? I saw the poster.”

Doreen's head jerked up. Rhoda, in the concert?
Rhoda?
She couldn't be. No children, Miss Forrest had said…

She looked at Rhoda and saw that her face had flooded with scarlet.

So it was true.

“Poster?” Rhoda stammered. “Where?” She wouldn't meet Doreen's eye.

Doreen sprang to her feet, fists clenched. She looked at her mother. Had she known? But she could see from her face that she hadn't.

Ian began to cry. Phyl soothed him, unaware of the effect her remark had had. “They must have just gone up,” she said. “I saw one in the High Street, in Jennings' window, when I got off the bus. All those names. There's a lot of people in it…”

“Doreen—” began Rhoda.

“I'm going out,” said Doreen.

She ran all the way to the High Street, and stopped outside Jennings'. There it was: a proper printed poster, with a drawing at the top of someone playing a piano, and underneath the list of performers: “Miss Hilda West … Mrs Elsie Meadows … Mrs Adeline Dyer…” and, last of all, “Miss Rhoda Kelly”.

“Doreen!”

Rhoda was running down the street towards her. She arrived panting. “Doreen – don't think – I'm not going to do it unless you can—”

“Yes, you are!” said Doreen. “It says here you are: ‘Miss Rhoda Kelly'. No mention of me.” She was burning up with anger. She had wanted so much to be in the concert; the thought of Rhoda being in it and not her was unbearable. “Now I know what you've been doing up at Aunty Elsie's! Getting round Miss Forrest—”