The Heart of the Family (35 page)

‘At the Grafton. Jean, that’s Luke’s mum, had asked me if I’d go with Luke’s twin sisters to keep a bit of an eye on them, and then Carole asked if she could come with us, and of course I said yes. Then she met these Irish boys there.’ Anne’s unquestioning sympathy was such a relief that it was easy for Katie to confide in her and spill out all her pent-up worries. ‘And that makes it worse somehow – them being Irish and not in uniform – although I know that that’s only because they’re working down at the docks.’

‘I’ll bet they’ve silver tongues and good looks if they’re anything like the Irish I’ve met,’ Anne laughed.

Katie gave her a grateful look. ‘Yes, they have, and I suppose that’s why Carole told them—’ She stopped abruptly, her face burning with guilt and discomfort.

‘That’s why she told them what?’ Anne pressed.

‘Oh, nothing, really,’ Katie denied.

For a minute there was silence and then Anne said gravely, ‘Katie, I know that Carole is your friend and naturally, as a good friend to her you want to protect her. I know too that you aren’t the kind of girl to go talking about anyone behind their backs, but we are at war, Katie, and in a war situation a person’s loyalty to their country must come before everything and everyone else. Now, is there something that, having searched your heart and your conscience, you think I should know that you have not yet told me?’

Katie bit her lip and then admitted reluctantly, ‘Carole met the boys first. There were four of them then, although it’s only Liam and Danny that come
and join us now. When she first introduced Danny to me he started to joke with me about reading people’s love letters.’

‘So he knew that you worked here?’

Katie nodded, adding quickly, ‘But that doesn’t mean that it was Carole who told him.’

They were not after all supposed to tell anyone about their work.

‘Have these young men asked you any other questions about your work?’

‘They’ve tried to, but I said straight out that I wouldn’t talk about it.’

‘And you’d have preferred to have nothing more to do with these young men, but Carole wants to and she’s quarrelled with you because you won’t, is that it?’

Unhappily Katie agreed. ‘I feel so bad about it all, especially now that I’m telling tales on her, and—’

‘You have nothing to feel bad about, Katie. Now, why don’t you go and get yourself some lunch?’

As she stood in her mother’s kitchen on the opposite side of the table from the doctor, her hands on the back of a chair to support herself, and listened to what he had to say, Bella knew that she had been wrong to think that in facing up to the fact that she could never truly be with the man she loved and who loved her, and that their love must be sacrificed in the name of honour and duty and marriage vows already made, she had faced the worst thing she ever would have to face; the most personally intimately emotionally painful, perhaps, but there were other kinds of pain, as she had just discovered.

When she had received a furious telephone call at work from her father, demanding that she come and remove her mother from his office, ‘otherwise I’ll call the police and she’ll end up in a cell,’ Bella had dropped everything immediately to go to telephone for a taxi to take her down to her father’s office. Having bribed the taxi driver very generously indeed to wait for her, she hurried inside, where she had found her mother, wearing her dressing gown and her slippers, and very obviously the worse for drink,
raging at both Pauline and Edwin between bouts of hysterical screaming and sobbing.

Somehow Bella had managed to persuade her mother to get into the car and had brought her home, having had to telephone her own house, where thankfully Gavin had been working finishing off the nursery, to ask him to come round and help her with her mother whilst they waited for the doctor.

It had been her mother’s violence that had made her think of ringing Gavin, and now Bella’s cheekbone was swelling with what would be a bruise where her mother had lashed out at her when Bella had been bundling her into the car.

Very discreetly and tactfully Gavin had offered to take Lena, who had insisted on accompanying him ‘in case I can help’, home, to give Bella privacy to talk to the doctor about Vi, but Lena had refused to leave, taking hold of Bella’s hand and saying stoutly, ‘I’m not leaving Bella to have to deal with this on her own, Gavin, not after all that she’s done for me.’

The doctor had nodded approvingly, despite Bella’s protests that Lena needed to think of herself and her baby and not worry about her.

Now the four of them were in the kitchen, and Vi was upstairs in bed, and very soon a private home nurse would be arriving to sit with her overnight to make sure that she didn’t come to any harm.

‘I can’t believe that Mummy actually walked all the way down to Daddy’s office in her night things, like that. She’s always been so particular and so proud. She was even refusing to go to my cousin Grace’s wedding because she doesn’t want her sister to know what’s happened. I just don’t know what to
do, Doctor. Somehow she’s still managing to get hold of some gin, on the black market, I suppose.’ Bella shivered, thinking of the risks her mother must be running dealing with black market crooks in her openly vulnerable state. ‘I suppose the best thing would be for me to move Mummy in with me and then see if I can find someone to look after her.’

That was the last thing Bella wanted, but duty was duty, and Vi was her mother.

‘I think for the moment that the best thing for your mother, Bella, would be for her to be admitted to The Sisters of Our Lady Nursing Home, where she can be properly looked after and rested,’ the doctor announced firmly.

And where there would be no alcohol and twenty-four-hour-a-day nursing care to make sure that she could not go out as she had done today, Bella recognised.

‘I don’t want to think that Mummy is being punished, Doctor. After all, it’s really Daddy’s fault that she’s doing what she is.’

‘There is no question of that, Bella, but we do need to get your mother’s health back to normal.’

A ring on the front doorbell heralded the arrival of the nurse, a no-nonsense middle-aged woman in a uniform so starched that it crackled, and yet who, whilst looking rather fierce, somehow managed to reassure Bella with her manner that her mother would be in good hands.

‘How long will Mummy need to be in the nursing home for?’ Bella asked the doctor anxiously. ‘Only if it is for any length of time I should really tell Charlie. Not that he will do anything. He’s not even written to her since Daddy left.’

‘I hope not for too long,’ was the doctor’s ambiguous response, as he picked up his bag and headed for the hall, where Bella handed him his coat and then waited whilst he put on his hat.

When Bella returned to the kitchen it held that kind of silence that said that its occupants had been discussing the situation in her absence.

This was confirmed when Lena looked at Gavin and then at Bella and then said determinedly, ‘Me and Gavin have just been talking, Bella, and we both think that you should have a word with your mum’s sister.’

‘Auntie Jean? But she and Mummy hardly ever speak to one another, and Mummy didn’t even want her to know about Daddy leaving.’

‘Well, maybe your mum doesn’t want her to know, but what about you needing someone in your family that you can turn to, Bella? It’s not right that you’re having to cope with your mum carrying on like she is on your own, and I reckon from what you’ve told me about your auntie that she’d want to know anyway, what with her and your mum being twins.’

Lena did have a point, Bella admitted, and besides, Jean would have to be told something. After all, Bella could hardly turn up at Grace’s wedding without her mother without saying something, and if she didn’t go at all that would be an awful insult.

‘I’ll think about it,’ she promised Lena.

Katie felt dreadful. She felt she should not have confided in Anne, even if both Anne and the supervisor had insisted that just the opposite was the case. She knew that.

Certainly Carole felt that she had betrayed her and let her down. Not that Carole had said so directly
to Katie. And now it was too late for Carole to tell her anything because not only had she been dismissed, she had also been sent home and warned not to make or receive any contact from the young Irishman whose company she had enjoyed so much that she had been prepared to put her relationship with Andy at risk.

There had been a horrible incident after she had been summoned by their supervisor and before she had been escorted out of the building and, so it was rumoured, to her auntie’s to collect her things, and from there to a new billet and job in some remote part of the country.

Katie, unaware initially that Carole had been summoned by their supervisor, had not known what was happening until Carole had been marched back to her desk virtually under escort, and had then burst out bitterly in front of everyone else at the table that Katie was a traitor to their friendship and that she had deliberately lied about her to get her into trouble, and that she, Carole, intended to make sure that Katie paid for that disloyalty.

What had made things so much worse had been that despite her nastiness, Carole had been crying and Katie had known immediately just how hard her former friend had been hit by the discovery that her friendship with Liam was going to be stopped by a far higher authority than that of a mere overseas boyfriend. Carole had been distraught at the thought of never seeing Liam again and Katie had recognised with a sinking heart that Carole’s relationship with the young Irishman had become far more intimate and intense than Katie had been allowed to know. It was all horrible and awful. They had been such good friends and Katie felt bereft
without that friendship, as well as terribly guilty about poor Carole’s fate.

This dreadful war … She longed for it to be over. It was nearly six months since Luke had been sent overseas, as long a period as that during which she had known him and spent with him. Sometimes, no matter how much she gazed at his photograph – one that she had taken herself before he had left, and in which he was smiling at her with those lovely bright blue eyes of his, even if the photograph did not show their colour – she felt panicky and afraid that somehow her memory was losing him and that he and their love were slipping away from her. They might write to one another of how strong their love was, but writing those words wasn’t like holding one another and whispering them. Even the Luke smell of the woollen scarf she had teased from him before he had left had gone from the wool, so that now when she buried her face in it with her eyes tightly closed, and tried to imagine that she was breathing in the scent of his skin, all she could really smell was the carbolic soap smell of her own hands.

She needed him so desperately now to comfort her and to tell her that she had done the right thing. But had she? Luke was fiercely loyal to his men, and what was Andy going to think and feel when he found out what she had done?

War was so confusing and muddling at times. Of course Katie knew that her loyalty was to her country above and beyond everything and anyone else, but right now that felt like a cold treacherous loyalty that had involved her in hurting someone who had been a good friend, and no amount of reassurance from anyone at work could ease the pain of that feeling.

Bella took a deep breath as she got off the ferry, and looked up towards the city of Liverpool itself. Her tummy was churning with nerves, and despite the bone-chilling cold of the wind whipping across the wave-laden grey water of the Atlantic beyond the Mersey bar, her face was burning with apprehension. What if Auntie Jean wasn’t in? What if she refused to see her? What if …?

But she mustn’t think of those things. Those were the kind of thought the old Bella would have had, and she wasn’t that Bella any more. So much had happened to her to change her these last few months that Bella could scarcely remember exactly what the old Bella had been like. She certainly knew that the old Bella would never for a moment have felt humbled and grateful for the love of a man so dear to her that he meant everything, whilst at the same time knowing that that love could never be publicly acknowledged or privately given. And yet the gift of Jan’s love had brought to her heart a peaceful joy that had eased so many sore places inside her that she could only rejoice in it with a quiet dignity and delight that needed no public recognition. It was
right and proper that Jan should support and look after his poor unhappy wife. Bella knew that having seen and known so much of the pain that came from broken vows, she could never live happily knowing that she was responsible for the destruction of another’s marriage, and wisely she knew too that it would not sit easily with Jan’s sense of honour to do so either.

She had had a visit from Maria – on her own, without Bettina – and whilst at first she had feared that Jan must have confided in his mother and that she had come to berate her, Maria had quickly made it plain that she had come in the spirit of friendship and a new start. Jan had indeed told his mother of his feelings for Bella, and of Bella’s own decision that they must put their love for one another to one side for the sake of his marriage.

‘You are a good person. You must be if my Jan loves you,’ Maria had told her in her heavily accented English. ‘And now you have proved this with your sacrifice of your own happiness.’

‘I am sure that Jan’s wife will realise how lucky she is and that … that she will want to become a proper wife to him,’ Bella had responded, squeezing out the words from a heart that felt as though it was being crushed at the thought of Jan being happy with someone else and not knowing how she could bear it, whilst also knowing that for Jan’s sake and the sake of his marriage she must.

‘I had not thought well of you but now I see that I was wrong. You are a woman of great love and great courage,’ Maria had said to her, touching her hand and then her face as though she genuinely cared
about Bella’s own feelings and understood them, and Bella knew that in Jan’s mother she now had an ally and not an enemy.

It wasn’t a particularly long walk from the terminal to her auntie Jean’s house, but although Bella had initially stepped out briskly, as much to escape the cold wind as anything else, by the time she had reached the pre-Christmas bustle of St John’s Market, with its long queues of housewives eager to take advantage of Churchill’s edict that every family was to have the benefit of a traditional Christmas dinner, her walking pace had slowed, hampered by her growing anxiety about how she might be received. Her auntie Jean had no reason to welcome her, after all. Bella could think of a dozen and more instances when she had given her mother’s twin sister every reason to dislike her intensely, and something in Bella’s own growing sense of awareness made her worry about the moral rightness of her asking her aunt for help now at this time of her mother’s need when Vi had been so eager in the past to look down on her less materially well off twin.

But somehow or other, even though she was dragging her footsteps, she had reached her auntie’s street, and with her heart in her mouth Bella walked down it until at last she was opening the neat white-painted wooden gate and walking up the path to the front step to ring the front doorbell.

When Jean opened her front door to find her niece, Bella, standing on the step she was so astonished that for a few seconds she just stood there staring at her without saying a word. This was, after all, the first time that Bella had ever paid them a visit, but then when Jean saw the anxiety in Bella’s eyes and registered
the way she made to step back from the door, ducking her head in exactly the same way that Lou did when she felt abashed, Jean reacted instinctively to the need she sensed in her niece and reached out to put her hand on Bella’s arm, saying warmly, ‘Bella, how lovely to see you. Come on in.’

Her aunt’s kindness was almost too much for Bella, and she had to search in her pocket for her handkerchief as she followed Jean into a warm cosy hallway.

‘Goodness, it’s cold out there,’ Jean shivered. ‘Let me take your coat and then I’ll put the kettle on. You won’t mind if we go into the back room, I hope, Bella, only it’s warmer in there.’

Obediently Bella handed over her coat and her hat, unable to stop herself from contrasting her auntie Jean’s behaviour with that of her own mother. Jean had natural maternal warmth about her that felt like being wrapped in a cosy blanket, Bella acknowledged as she followed Jean into the back room with its warm comforting smell of home-made soup from the pan simmering gently on the gas stove.

‘You must be wondering what I’m doing here,’ Bella began as soon as Jean had coaxed her into a chair. ‘It’s about Mummy, Auntie Jean.’ Bella couldn’t help herself, the strain of the last few weeks brought sharp tears to her eyes, revealing to Bella herself the full weight of the burden she had been carrying as her emotions overwhelmed her.

Jean lifted an anxious hand to her chest where her heart had started to pound. She and Vi might not be close any more and indeed there were many occasions on which her twin exasperated and even annoyed her, but Vi was still Jean’s twin, for all that there were
many things she had done and many sadnesses for which she was responsible that Jean deplored.

‘Something’s happened to Vi?’ Jean demanded shakily.

Bella bit her lip. This was so very hard to do. She felt both like a traitor to her mother and very conscious of the fact that her visit could be interpreted as a way of getting out of her own responsibility towards Vi.

‘It’s nothing for you to worry about, Auntie Jean. I know how busy you’ll be, with the wedding and everything, it’s just that I thought, well, it was Lena who said I should come and see you really. She’s got ever such a sensible head on her shoulders, despite her being so young …’ Bella broke off and gave her aunt a rueful smile. ‘Here’s me going on about Lena and I dare say you won’t even know who she is. She’s a girl that Charlie got into trouble and then abandoned. She’s living with me now, though, and she and the baby will be properly provided for, no mistake about that.’

Whilst Jean was still struggling to take this surprising information on board, and the even more surprising discovery that Bella, the niece she had always thought of as the most selfish and uncaring young woman there could possibly be, had somehow been transformed into someone who had taken upon herself such a heavy responsibility, Bella continued bleakly, ‘I know that Mummy doesn’t want you to hear about this, and I do feel mean for telling you, but, well, the fact is, Auntie Jean, that Daddy has done the most dreadful thing. He has left Mummy to go and live with his assistant. He’s making Mummy divorce him. I’ve done my best and I’ve
managed to get the house out of him for her, and a decent allowance, but, well, you can imagine how she feels.’ Bella gave a sad shake of her head. ‘She’s taken it so very badly – the shame of it, you know, and people knowing, even though she isn’t the one who has done anything wrong. But that’s not really why I’ve come. You see, poor Mummy has started drinking, and our doctor has had her placed in a nursing home so that she can be properly looked after. She will be able to get well again, but of course she won’t be at Grace’s wedding and …’

Before Bella could say any more Jean went over to her and took her in her arms, holding her tightly.

‘Oh, Bella, love, when did all this happen?’

‘A while ago,’ Bella admitted tearfully. Her aunt smelled of warmth and lavender water, and somehow weirdly of Bella’s own childhood, and a sudden memory came to her of being a little girl sitting on her auntie’s knee in a sunny back garden.

‘And you’ve been struggling with all of this on your own,’ Jean reproached her.

‘Lena’s been a total brick even though baby is due towards the end of Janaury. She was the one who urged me to come and tell you.’

‘I should think so as well. What about your Charlie?’

‘I’ve told him about Daddy leaving, but he hasn’t come home or anything. I dare say he won’t want Daphne’s family knowing, and neither, of course, would Mummy.

‘It was horrid having to get her from Daddy’s office, Auntie Jean. She had gone all that way there in her dressing gown. I’ve tried to stop her getting any more gin, but …’

‘Oh, Bella.’ Jean felt guilty as well as shocked. Surely as Vi’s twin she ought to have sensed that something was wrong, and it went against everything that Jean as a loving mother believed in that someone of Bella’s age should have to deal with such a situation all by herself.

‘I’m so frightened for Mummy, Auntie Jean,’ Bella admitted, voicing her fear for the first time.

‘Don’t be, love. We’ll sort something out. Where did you say she was? Only I’d like to go and see her if she’s allowed to have visitors.’

Bella shook her head. ‘It’s a nursing home in Wallasey, run by nuns, but Mummy isn’t allowed any visitors at the moment. She won’t be coming to the wedding, of course …’

‘But you must come, Bella, please. I’ll worry about you if you don’t,’ Jean told her firmly, not hesitating to use the emotional blackmail she would once have thought would have no effect on her niece whatsoever. But Bella had changed, Jean could see that, and now in the new maturity she could see in Bella’s pretty face Jean could see a far greater resemblance to her own Grace.

‘The Ambassador has said that seeing as we’re going to Liverpool, he wants me to show my face at some high-level security place they’ve got up there, and give a bit of support to one of our generals who has been invited to attend some kind of official reception party.’

Fran understood. She was perfectly happy to support Brandon in his role as a young American airman attached to the American Embassy in an unnamed diplomatic role, all the more so because she suspected
that his health was deteriorating faster than he was prepared to admit. He had lurched into her a couple of times when they had been walking together recently, the lurch of a young man who might have had too much to drink, perhaps, in the eyes of the outer world, but to Fran one of the signs of the progress of his illness the specialist had warned her to be on the lookout for. It had surprised her how protective she had become of her young husband and how very deeply involved with him she was – not as a wife or as a lover, but more as a cross between an older sister and a mother. It made her heart ache for him to know that his own parents had virtually turned their backs on him to such an extent that he felt they would reject him outright if they knew of his condition. His father would never tolerate anything or anyone that was not first rate and perfect, Brandon had told Fran, and his mother would throw a hysterical fit and then blame him for being ill and distressing her. Neither of them would give him the emotional support Fran knew he needed. But if he didn’t have them at least he did have her, and she was determined to be with him through everything, no matter what.

Lou stared blindly at the shop window. She had no real recollection of having walked here from the exchange but obviously she had done. There was certainly nothing in the shop window – a run-down haberdasher’s – to merit her fixed gaze. Her heart was pounding and there was a horrid sick feeling in her tummy. She had really gone and done it now. The supervisor had said as much when she had torn a strip off her and told her in that frosty voice of hers that she was jeopardising Sasha’s chances of being given a
permanent position, never mind her own with her bad behaviour. Sasha had cried afterwards and begged her to try harder, but she had tried, she really had. However, the harder she tried the more she hated working at the exchange and the more she wanted to run away from everything that working there meant. Sasha didn’t understand that, though; she didn’t care about how she, Lou, was feeling because all Sasha cared about now was that stupid boy Bobby.

Lou turned round, apologising as she bumped into two smart-looking girls in WAAF uniforms, her heart twisting with fresh misery. How happy they looked in their uniforms. How exciting their lives must be compared with her own. Only the other week one of the girls they’d been at school with, whom they’d bumped into at the Grafton, had been full of how a cousin of hers had joined the WAAF and was actually flying aeroplanes from factories to RAF bases in England. Just imagining having a job like that, and getting away from the exchange and Liverpool and all those things that were making her feel so miserable, including Sasha. Lou knew that she ought to go back to the exchange. She had, after all, walked out without asking permission, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do so. She looked down the street, her attention caught by a second group of young women in WAAF uniform, coming out of a recruitment office further down the street. How she envied them.