The Shop Girls of Chapel Street (37 page)

Five minutes later the superintendent returned. ‘Follow me,' he directed. He led them across the dark hallway and down a wide corridor at the back of the house into a small room with a scrubbed table and painted pine chairs. There were framed religious tracts on the cream walls and one small window overlooking a yard.

‘Sit down.' Towers pulled two of the chairs from under the table. ‘I've told Douglas you're here.'

‘Did you explain who we were? What did he say?' Violet demanded of the superintendent. Her skipping heartbeat had turned to a heavy thumping as she put down her handbag and gripped the edge of the table.

‘I did tell him. He didn't say anything but I could see it was a shock.'

‘You can say that again,' Stan muttered, hanging back in a corner of the room and looking ill at ease. ‘I'm not thrilled to be here myself.'

Violet and Stan heard slow footsteps coming down the corridor towards them. Stan prepared himself by fixing his gaze on the flat stone roofs of the outhouses across the yard, watching two grey pigeons squat there in the rain. Violet stared straight at the door.

The footsteps stopped outside. The superintendent darted nimbly to open the door then stood to one side. ‘Here they are, Douglas – your visitors,' he announced before sliding out of the room.

A tall man shuffled forward. His hair was thick and white. A shapeless grey jacket hung loosely over his stooped frame and deep lines on his spare face gave him a permanently miserable look. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses with black lenses obscured his eyes.

Violet's heart lurched and she sprang to her feet. ‘This way,' she murmured, taking hold of his arm and leading him to the nearest chair.

Douglas Tankard ran his fingers along the edge of the table then bent to feel the seat of the chair. He sat cautiously with a quick movement of his head towards Violet. ‘Who's here?' he asked.

‘Violet and Stan – your daughter and your son. We think.'

There was a pause but no attempt at denial. ‘Flo named you after her favourite flower, did she?'

‘I didn't know that. She died when I was born.' Violet fell silent, pressing her lips together to bring herself back under control.

There was a long sigh followed by silence. Then, ‘Yes – violets were her favourites. Never mind that; how did you two track me down?'

‘Uncle Donald wrote the address in a letter before he passed away.'

‘Dead then.' The blind man's voice didn't express regret. It was low and rich – perhaps the last vestige of the attractive man he must once have been. ‘Stan, where are you?'

‘Here in the corner.' Stan emerged from his first shock and saw in the wreckage of his father's face and frame himself as an older man – they shared the same long limbs and prominent Adam's apple, the same beak-like nose. He resisted a strong urge to run from the room and slam the door behind him.

‘Are you expecting me to say sorry?' Tankard addressed Stan in a sharper tone. ‘Would it make any difference if I did?'

‘Not to me. I'm here to look after Violet, that's all,' Stan assured him, feeling muscles at the corners of his jaw twitch and jump.

Tankard tapped the table with his fingertips. There was a tremor in his hand that he couldn't control. ‘What about you, Violet? Why are you here?'

‘I found the bracelet and the note,' she began before her feelings overwhelmed her – astonishment at what she saw and heard, followed by sadness wrenching at her heart and stinging disappointment that her father was not the man she'd hoped he would be. Words were not enough – she had to give the blind, broken man sitting at the hostel table time to work out for himself what had brought her here.

‘You want answers,' Tankard guessed. ‘For a start, why I took up with Florence in the first place and why I ditched her.'

‘Yes.' Struggling against the tide of feelings that washed over her, Violet fixed on the one question that mattered. ‘I want to know – did you love her?'

In the corner of the room, Stan banged his fist against the wall. Then he strode towards the door. ‘I'm not staying to hear this,' he vowed.

Violet jumped up but was too late to stop him leaving. ‘Stan, I'm sorry,' she called after him.

‘I'll wait outside,' he muttered over his shoulder.

‘Leave him. He's sticking up for his mother and I don't blame him.' Tankard sighed. ‘For what it's worth, you can tell him afterwards that I loved them both – Gladys and Florence. Is that what
you
want to hear?'

‘Only if it's true.' She sat back down to face the blind man and hear him out.

Tankard leaned his elbows on the table and let his head hang low. ‘As far as I could, I loved them. But the lad is right to be angry – I was young and callow back then and the type of love I could offer wasn't enough.'

‘As far as you could, you loved them,' Violet echoed. She let his answer settle like autumn leaves drifting from trees.

‘Anyway, I paid a high price,' Tankard said bitterly.

‘Yes – what happened to your eyesight?' Violet asked once she'd gained mastery over her voice.

‘Gas – that's what happened.' Tankard kept on tapping the table with an uncertain, drum-like beat. ‘Gravenstafel, the twenty-second of April, 1915. You understand me?'

Violet dug deep into her memory of the accounts she'd read of war on the Western Front. ‘That's when the Germans used gas against the allies.'

‘That's right – at Wipers. The French were on the front line. We stood back and watched the green mist creep towards them. It killed thousands. They hadn't got a clue what was happening so they breathed it in, started foaming at the mouth and choking to death. We saw them retreat, falling like flies. Then the wind changed direction and the gas came straight at us. I saw fellow Tommies a few yards ahead of me struck blind in a flash. As soon as I felt the sting of it, I ran.'

Tankard relived the battle with his head still bowed. ‘I couldn't see a bloody thing. I was down in the mud, crawling on my hands and knees, trying to stay ahead of the worst of it, right into a barrage of ack-ack guns from my own side. In the end, I found a crater made by a shell, dropped into it and stopped where I was until it died down. My eyes and lungs felt on fire. All I could hear was men screaming and bodies thudding down on top of me.'

Violet closed her eyes at the horror of what he described. ‘And when it was all over?' she queried.

‘Silence – I remember that. And darkness. I won't tell you what I had to do to claw my way out of there. Up on the surface, there was still no sound, no sign of anyone. Then I made out a light in the distance and staggered towards it. The light came from a farmhouse half a mile behind the Front. I found a barn with hay in it. I crept in there and curled up like an animal.'

‘Still blinded by the gas?'

Tankard nodded. ‘In the morning I crawled outside to find a water butt to cool the raging fire in my eyes. The farmer's wife found me and bandaged me up. She kept me in that barn and never said a word about me going back to my regiment, even when the blisters started to heal. She'd lost her own son to the Germans in the first battle of Ypres and found me in the second so she nursed me and gave me the clothes and food I needed to get out of it for good.'

‘Which you managed to do for the rest of the war?' The army record was proof of this and now Violet swung from any blame she might have felt to pure pity. ‘And your poor eyes – how much of your sight did you get back?'

‘The damage was done. For a few years I could see enough to get by – shapes and colours, that kind of thing. Then gradually it went completely. Right from the start I knew I wasn't much good to anyone – not to Gladys or Florence, or to you and Stan, especially since it was me who'd buggered off in the first place. No, the best thing was for me to get back to the area I knew best, change my name and lie low here in Welby. Besides, the army was after me, remember. Gas or not, I ran the risk of being lined up in front of a firing squad for hiding in that barn.'

‘And all this time I've been living less than half an hour's train ride away with Aunty Winnie and Uncle Donald, without any of us knowing the first thing about you.' Even though the reasons had begun to take shape, Violet still felt the abandonment keenly. In her mind's eye she was five years old again, smarting from Donald's harsh criticisms and wondering what in the world she could do to please him. ‘Aunty Winnie was a mother to me – the best in the world – but I can't say the same for Uncle Donald. The truth is, I needed a father in my life and you weren't there.'

‘You wouldn't have wanted me – not like this,' Tankard insisted as he left off drumming and rested his hand on the table. The tremor continued. ‘I'm not asking for pity because I don't deserve it. It was me – I cut myself off because I didn't want anyone to see how low I'd fallen. That's pride for you. And if you want to know whether I've thought about you and Stan over the years, the honest answer is no, I haven't.'

Across the table from him, Violet felt the cherished dream of being loved by her father shrivel and die. She thought again of the note Tankard had written to her mother and the words,
lifelong affection
. Not undying love that came from deep in the heart – only shallow affection that could be cauterized and cut out, despite Florence's forlorn longing for a man who would stand by her. Violet took the blue box from her handbag and slid it across the table. ‘This is for you,' she murmured.

Tankard reached out and felt the velvet surface with trembling fingers. He seemed to recognize what it was but left it unopened. ‘I haven't dwelt on the thought of you two growing up without me because there wouldn't be any point. I was never going to change my mind and come looking for you.'

‘Why not? You must have known where to find us.'

‘I could have done it,' he acknowledged. ‘But I was Douglas Thornton by this time, remember. For one thing, your uncle would have had it in for me because of what I'd done to Joe. And if I'd come to claim you, I'd have had the army on my back thanks to him.'

It all made sense to Violet, who now had to swallow the bitter pill. Not enough love and a big helping of fear was the lethal combination that had kept her father away. ‘The note you wrote to my mother is still in the box with the bracelet,' she told him, snapping her handbag shut.

He pressed the catch of the blue box then lifted the chain from its satin nest. The tiny padlock gleamed pinkish-gold as he looped it over his gnarled, trembling fingers. ‘I got this from a pal of mine who worked in a pawnbroker's. He sold me it at a knock-down price and I had the engraving done especially for Flo – “Xmas 1914”. She was pleased as Punch.'

Violet had heard enough. She stood up jerkily. ‘Thank you,' she said in a voice that didn't seem to belong to her.

‘For what?'

‘For agreeing to see me after all these years.'
And for unlocking the padlock of the past, releasing me from false hope and setting my heart free.

‘You know where to find me.' Tankard raised his head and turned his face in Violet's direction – perhaps a sign of hope that she would visit again.

‘I do.' Her voice more disembodied than ever, she made her way to the door without making any promises. ‘And I do understand.'

She'd opened the door and was out in the corridor when her father issued a last request. ‘Will you make sure the lad does too?'

‘I will,' she agreed. She left without saying goodbye, only turning to glance over her shoulder at the blind man hunched at a table, carefully taking the note from the envelope, unfolding the heavily creased paper and with tremulous fingers tracing his long-ago, faint-hearted words to a woman he'd failed to love.

‘Where was Stan while all this was going on?' In the workroom above the shop, Muriel sounded irritated. ‘The idea was for him to go with you this morning to keep an eye on you, wasn't it?'

Violet pulled out some tacking stitches in a white blouse she was making for Kenneth Leach's wife, Avril. The order had come in while she was in Welby and she'd started work on it as soon as she got back. ‘One look at Douglas Tankard was enough for him.'

‘Was it that bad?' Muriel peered at Violet over the rim of her glasses, scissors poised.

‘Yes, Stan wasn't in a mood to forgive. And I didn't help by asking if our father had ever loved my mother. I put my foot in it good and proper. Poor Stan didn't know where to put himself. That's why he stormed off.'

‘But you're glad you stayed to hear the man out?'

‘I wouldn't say glad was the right word.' The tacking thread slipped easily through the silky rayon material. Violet held up the half-finished garment and decided that it was time to start on the collar.

‘Sad then?'

‘No, not sad either.' On the train journey home, Violet had pulled herself together and done her best to explain to Stan what had led Tankard to desert them but Stan was having none of it.

‘He was saving his own skin, that's the truth of it. I don't care if he was going blind – he should've been a man and owned up to what he'd done.'

‘Then he'd have had the army to deal with,' Violet had reasoned.

Stan had shaken his head and stared truculently out of the window, refusing to say another word about his father – not just now but for ever. He'd done his best to back Violet and look after her, but for him the subject was now closed.

‘Relieved?' Muriel steered a lightweight worsted fabric under the pounding needle of her sewing machine as she made a tailored jacket for Ella Kingsley.

‘Yes, I suppose that's it.' Violet relived the moment when she'd handed over the bracelet and loosened the chains of the past. ‘Honestly, though, it would break your heart to see Douglas Tankard and to hear what he had to say.'