Wartime Brides (39 page)

Charlotte had been so wrapped up in Edna’s problems that, for a little while at least, she had almost forgotten her own. She hoped with all her heart that things would mend between Edna and Colin, not that having Edna around the house was inconvenient. It was certainly big enough, but the only time the distraught young woman’s spirits lifted was when she was making paper chains with the children. Janet seemed to be the one able to reach her, and a smile would come to Edna’s lips as Janet talked about school and her thoughts for the future.

Charlotte sincerely hoped that Colin would send word for his wife to come home, not that she wasn’t welcome to stay for Christmas. Then Julian rang and her own problems once again became uppermost in her mind. He asked her how she would feel about David coming home for Christmas.

She hadn’t been expecting this. At first she choked on her answer. ‘I … really don’t …’ then she sighed. ‘I need to talk to the children first.’

She sensed his surprise. Julian had always been slightly Victorian where children were concerned: seen and not heard, that was his motto.

‘I need to prepare them,’ she said by way of explanation. As she put the phone down she knew it was only half the truth. It wasn’t just the children she needed
to
prepare. The moment Julian had made the suggestion her whole body had tensed as if waiting for a threatening blow. That was the legacy David had left her with. But sticking to her marriage vows was important to her. She knew that now, despite her happy interlude with Josef. Josef had been there when she needed him and, for the first time, she no longer felt guilty about it.

But she feared telling the children that their father was coming home. Janet seemed so nonchalant about everything nowadays except her future being threatened by the atomic bomb. Geoffrey was less easily read. He had been morose ever since the day she’d collected him for the holidays. Something had been troubling him but she could not for the life of her work out what it was.

She made up her mind to tell them that evening.

A generous fire in the grate and the soft lamplight threw an amber glow over the sitting room walls.

Mrs Grey brought in mugs of Ovaltine on a tray along with bread and butter and home-made damson jam. She drew the curtains before leaving the room. A cosy scene, thought Charlotte, and judged the time was right.

She took a deep breath. ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

Geoffrey said. ‘Is it about Christmas?’

‘Yes.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Your father’s coming home.’

Geoffrey leaned forward expectantly. ‘Is it for long? Does he have to go abroad again?’

Charlotte paused. Now was the time to tell them the truth. ‘I haven’t been entirely honest with you. He hasn’t
been
abroad, darling. He’s been in hospital. He hasn’t been well.’

Geoffrey looked relieved. ‘He’s bound to get better. He’s a doctor.’

Charlotte felt the urge to explain further. ‘None of us realised it, but his nervous system was injured in the war. It affected his mind.’

Janet had remained strangely silent. Charlotte eyed her nervously, seeking some reaction.

‘Is he going to rant and rave at me like he used to?’

Charlotte adopted a calm countenance and a voice to match. ‘He’s taking medicine. There’s really nothing to fear. Professor Sands assures me he should be all right, more like the man he used to be.’

She turned to Geoffrey. He was staring at her wide-eyed, his jaw less rigid and his eyes brighter than they had been in ages.

She asked him outright whether he was looking forward to seeing his father again.

He met her question with one of his own. ‘Does that mean you and dad are going to get back together?’ She was surprised. Was he really keen to have him back home, the man who had strapped his backside with a leather belt? Surely there must be some reason for this.

‘I think we have to try,’ she said softly.

Geoffrey slumped back in the chair and for a brief moment she thought he was going to demand that he be put on the next train back to school. His response caught her completely by surprise.

‘Good. When I go back to school I can tell them that
my
parents are
not
getting divorced. I shall be just like everyone else, with a father and a mother, and they won’t treat me like Alistair Broadbent. His parents got divorced before the war even ended. Everyone avoids him. Their parents have told them to.’

Charlotte was shocked. ‘I hope you are not one of those boys, Geoffrey. I would be very annoyed with you if you treated Alistair like that. It must be very sad for him.’

Geoffrey shrugged. ‘He’s OK.’

OK! Charlotte clasped her hands together and studied the china cups resting neatly in their matching saucers. Like their lives, the English language had undergone a subtle change. Would it revert back now the Americans had left? She doubted it. Everything was different now.

‘Oh, well,’ she said, at least attempting cheerfulness, ‘it seems we might have a family Christmas after all.’

After Mrs Grey had cleared away, Janet began reading and Geoffrey started a jigsaw puzzle. Charlotte took the opportunity to go to the study. She must write to Josef and explain what had happened. She knew she must suggest it might be better if he stopped writing to her.

She sat poised, with pen in hand. The paper sat on the desk, waiting for her words to fall across the page. It wasn’t easy to find the right words to say without giving offence or causing hurt that was as unbearable to her as it would be to him. Of course, she could offer to keep writing on a purely platonic level, friends at a distance. She knew she had to put any other feelings aside if she were to cope with rebuilding her marriage. Like severing a limb, she had to cut Josef out of her life. It might indeed
make
her feel incapacitated, not quite a whole human being but, for better or worse, those were the terms under which she’d married back in the thirties. Things might be different in the future for Edna and Polly and her daughter’s generation. The young ones might very well take a more casual attitude towards marriage. But she could not. The society she had been born into had made her that way.

So she wrote the letter and tried to forget how good it had felt when she and Josef were together. After that, she wrote Christmas cards and as she signed inside each snowy scene, each shining Madonna, she held on to the hope that David might indeed be on the road to recovery.

Chapter Twenty-One

EDNA WOULD BE
staying with Charlotte over Christmas and she was grateful. Although she had heard nothing from her mother, her natural sense of duty took her to her mother’s front door.

Bad feeling had persisted between them, most of it emanating from Ethel’s side since the wedding when they’d moved into the house in Kent Street without telling her anything about it.

Christmas was a time of forgiveness, Edna decided, and anyway, she wanted to tell her mother that a loving couple had adopted Sherman and perhaps she’d been right in the first place. Even though she still grieved at her son’s going, she could not forgive herself for leaving the poor child in an orphanage for months at a time while she searched for the courage to tell Colin about him. Things should have been different.

The front door was open, but the interior glass door with its white china knob was tightly shut. She opened it and called for her mother.

‘Out here,’ called her father.

She could hear her father coughing and clearing his chest in the living room, which opened out onto the kitchen at the back of the house.

A cold draught seeped from the living room door. Edna smiled sadly, guessing what her father was doing even before she saw him.

There he was in the middle of the room. The window was open and he was waving his arms around in an effort to get rid of the smell of pipe smoke. Smoking was something confined to the garden shed.

His face brightened. ‘Thank goodness. I thought it was yer mother.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Gone shopping for a turkey or, if she can’t get that, she’s going to settle for a nice capon.’

Edna was surprised. There were few of those about except on the black market. ‘That’ll cost money.’

‘Oh,’ he said brightly, ‘she’s got plenty of dollars. You can get more with dollars than you can with pound notes, you know.’

Edna frowned. ‘Dollars? I didn’t know she had any …’

‘Oh yes. There were dollars at the top of those boxes, you know.’

Mention of the boxes also brought the letters to mind. She’d only found out about them on the fateful morning that Colin had found them. They were gone now, nothing but ashes. In the past, her sin and any mention of the parcels had made her blush with shame. But her father had just disclosed that there was something else in the
parcels
. Dollars! Dollars that officially belonged to her or Sherman, and her mother, the guardian of law-abiding respectability, had kept them in order to buy food on the black market!

Edna stood as if frozen. Her father, suddenly realising the implications of what he’d just said, stepped forward. ‘They were going to waste, Edna. I’m sure she’d have given them to you if she’d thought it was for the best.’

Sherman’s dollars. If she had had them, perhaps she could have managed to keep him without a father and without having to work. She was vaguely aware of her father muttering things like ‘it was all for the best’. But there had been an option she knew nothing about and now there were none.

He was her father and far softer than her mother, but she could no longer bear to look at him. In a matter of seconds she was out on the street, running down over the hill toward the main road. At the rate she ran it was no more than forty minutes before she was standing outside the house in Kent Street. The place was in darkness. She’d never known that before. She wondered where Colin might be. Perhaps he’d gone out with Billy to the Red Lion for a quick pint. Perhaps he was going to have more than one bitter in his present state of mind. And it was all her fault for not standing up to her mother.

She stood there staring until frost spangled her hair and froze her fingers. The only warmth came from the tear that escaped from the corner of her eye and ran down her cheek.

It was no good staying. This wasn’t the time to face Colin and, besides, she didn’t have a key.

Slowly and forlornly, she walked to the end of the street, quickening her steps as she reached the main road where patches of light fell from shop windows and made the pavements glisten.

She was hardly aware of the van pulling up alongside her until Billy gave a quick blast on the horn. She jumped. She’d been so deep in her thoughts.

‘Need a lift?’

She nodded.

He didn’t ask where she wanted to go but assumed it was back to Charlotte’s.

Before getting in she looked back over her shoulder towards Kent Street and imagined Colin sitting alone in the darkness. It was too much to bear.

On the drive back to Clifton, Billy kept talking, telling her that everything would be all right. Colin would come round. But his constant chatter only served to convince her that the opposite was true. Her life was a mess. Under pressure from her mother she’d given up her child and because of that, her marriage too was over. All she felt was shame.

When she burst into tears Billy immediately brought the van to a halt and wrapped an arm around her.

‘Come on, girl. Tell yer old pal Billy about it.’

It all poured out. She told him about meeting Sherman’s new parents and signing the adoption papers. She also told him how she blamed herself for not standing up to her mother.

‘If I’d been braver in the first place,’ she said plaintively.

Billy patted her hand. ‘Never you mind. Just leave things to old Billy and things will be fine.’

It was difficult to sleep that night, but in her dreams a Christmas angel put in an appearance and promised her that everything would work out for the best. It was a funny kind of angel: flowing white robe topped with a brown trilby tipped back on the head. When he said things would get better, he winked – just as Billy had done.

A few days before Christmas Billy gave Colin a lift to the hospital. Edna had already told him that he’d got very secretive about these visits and how she was worried he might be ill.

Billy told Polly how it was when he collected her from the pictures that night in a new van that was suspiciously khaki in colour. She didn’t ask where he’d got it. She’d rather not know.

‘Is Colin going to see Edna over Christmas?’ she asked.

Billy shrugged. ‘That depends.’

Polly looked at him long and hard, then she frowned. There was a twinkle in his eyes. He looked smug. ‘Billy Hills, are you keeping secrets from me?’

He feigned surprise. ‘You know me, Poll. Straight as a die!’

‘Straight as a snapped twig more like! Now come on. Tell me the truth.’

‘How much meat’s gonna be on that old cockerel of yours? Enough to invite both Edna and Colin? Only I
thought
if we could get the two of ’em together, it might just sort things out.’

Polly smiled and pinched his cheek. ‘My, but you’re a crafty one, Billy Hills. No wonder I love ya!’

‘Do you?’

Such was his joy that he started to turn his head.

Polly grabbed his chin and twisted it so he was looking straight ahead. ‘Keep your eyes on the road! We don’t want no more accidents!’

Meg and Carol were both in bed by the time they got back and, in the darkness of the hallway, Polly went out of her way to make Billy Hills think he’d died and gone to heaven. Her lips were hot, her hands were everywhere and she did things he’d never had done to him before. Everything else, including the ritual taking in of the chickens for the night went out of their heads.

On the following morning she smiled to herself as she made her way to the lavatory which was nestled up against the back garden wall.

Frost still clung to the pantiled roof of the small brick building that was barely big enough to sit down in. Hope the candle’s still alight, she thought to herself. If it wasn’t, the pipes would be frozen and it would be mid-morning or even late afternoon before they could flush.