Wartime Wife (27 page)

‘We’re no different than anyone else.’

‘Our Stanley seems to think so. He said he saw Dad …’ She paused, her mouth turning dry as her mind swiftly analysed the outcome of this. ‘He said Dad hits you.’

Mary Anne felt her whole body stiffening, like the proverbial pillar of salt. Her poor boy! Her poor boy! She should have known. She
had
known, but had failed to face the problem. She vowed to make sure he heard no more of his father’s tantrums – though quite how …

‘Our Stanley?’ She blurted the words, not wanting to confront her own unease. Disbelief formed a better shield. She stared at Lizzie, her hands flopped on the pile of shirts.

Lizzie saw the look in her mother’s eyes and it chilled her to the bone. ‘It’s true,’ she said slowly. ‘Don’t deny it, Ma. I can see it in your eyes.’

The body that had felt like a salt pillar now turned fluid. Mary Anne lowered her eyes and shook her head. ‘You don’t understand.’

Lizzie’s frown deepened and she folded her arms. Accusations could make one feel quite triumphant; but this wasn’t quite that, thought Lizzie. ‘Why do you protect him?’

Mary Anne thought hard how to smooth over this lump in her life. She couldn’t think of anything and consequently turned defensive.

‘Now that’s enough of all this! Less of your lip, Lizzie. Just be thankful you have a comfortable home provided for you. I’d never let anything hurt you, you know that. What goes on between me and yer father is not your business.’

‘Like your pawnbroking?’

Mary Anne’s jaw dropped. It was the second time Lizzie had surprised her. Besides being a business, the washhouse was the women’s place, like a club where they talked of their troubles among themselves.

‘That’s none of your business either.’

She attacked the washing with renewed vigour, stuffing it into the boiler though the water was not yet boiling and whites never did so well unless steam was rising. The way Lizzie, her own daughter, smiled and shook her head made Mary Anne feel like a silly little girl.

‘I’m warning you!’ said Mary Anne, suds flying from the finger she waved. ‘You’re getting too big for your boots.’

‘That’s because I’ve grown out of them. I’m grown up, Ma. I go to work. I’ve …’ She had been about to say that she’d known love, but she wasn’t quite sure she had any more. Her views on that were a bit distorted at the moment, so she took a different path. ‘I know about the business. We all know about it to some extent, but as long as we’re looked after and you’re happy, what does it matter?’

If Mary Anne had been dumbfounded before, she was doubly so now. ‘You know about it?’

‘Of course we do – well, me and Harry anyway. We added up all the things we have including Dad’s wages and ours, and found the figures didn’t add up. So we sneaked out here, found your little book and made a few enquiries. John hinted at it the last time he was home. Thanks to you our Daw’s got a whopping great ring on her finger.’

‘And she knows too?’

Lizzie folded her arms and shook her head. ‘Not Daw and not our Dad either.’

Mary Anne was tempted to ask why the two of them had never let on.

Reading her mind, Lizzie tilted her head to one side. ‘Isn’t it obvious? Me and Harry, and not forgetting our Stanley, are like you. We notice things. Dad and Daw don’t. They do the things they want to do and most everything else goes over their heads. As long as they get what they want, that’s it. They can’t help it. It’s just the way they are.’

Lizzie waited for her mother to respond, to unload at least some of her worries about her father. She dared to say what was on her mind. ‘Does he only hit you when he’s drunk?’

It might have been the child growing in her stomach, or it might just have been shock, because Mary Anne felt something tighten deep inside, as though she’d been kicked. All her life she had doted on her children, determined to give them a happy childhood and never, ever to expose them to the violence that existed deep in her husband’s soul.

If only they hadn’t grown up, but even so, they were still her children. She still deserved their respect. With that in mind she resolved not to let this go any further.

‘Children should be seen and not heard,’ she snapped.

Lizzie protested, ‘Ma! I’m not a child.’

Mary Anne eyed Lizzie up and down. Her expression was stiff and guarded, but she saw the same hair and eyes as her own, the same girl likely to fall in love as she had, perhaps get in trouble like she had and being handed a way out that might turn out less than happy.

‘Yes. You’ve grown up all right. I can see that,’ she said regretfully, then turned defiant again. ‘Though you don’t always act like it,’ she snapped, turning sharply back to her washing. ‘Sometimes you act like a silly girl.’

Lizzie felt her face reddening. She knew exactly where this was going.

‘I’m old enough to make my own choices, Ma.’

‘Peter Selwyn is not for you.’

Feeling slighted and immature, Lizzie fidgeted before recovering her nerve. ‘Hardly matters at the moment. He’s in Canada. And Mrs Selwyn is talking about going to stay with her sister in Bournemouth. That was why I was thinking of joining the Wrens.’

‘Well, you haven’t done it yet, have you?’

‘No.’

It had not been Lizzie’s intention to turn the spotlight on herself. Despite her recent reservations, her passion for Peter Selwyn still gnawed at her insides. Off and on, she missed him and although she knew her interest would not be welcome, she had asked Mrs Selwyn when he was likely to get leave.

Mrs Selwyn had kept her glassy eyes fixed on the flowers she was arranging in a vase. Her voice had been as cold as glass, each word like a sliver of steel expressed through tightly clenched teeth.

‘That is for his mother to know and not every nobody with whom he happens to have a passing acquaintance. After all, careless talk costs lives, as it says on the poster.’

Mrs Selwyn had left Lizzie in no doubt that she disapproved of her showing too much interest in her son.

‘You are a nobody,’ Lizzie had muttered while polishing the dining table with big, sweeping movements aggravated by anger rather than an overwhelming need to see her face in it.

It was also clear that his mother would disapprove of them marrying.

Peter had never mentioned marriage – not in so many words. Lizzie realised she’d been guilty of reading the possibility into the honeyed voice Peter had poured into her ear, while his hands explored her flesh, and her body had burned with longing.

It was a strange coincidence the following morning to find Mrs Selwyn was sitting at the breakfast table, reading a letter. She looked up beaming the moment Lizzie entered the room.

‘Elizabeth! I have received a letter this morning from my darling Peter. Isn’t that wonderful?’ To Lizzie’s surprise, she passed it to her. ‘You may read it if you wish. After all, although not a member of the family, you are a member of this household.’

Crockery was in danger of being rattled to pieces as she put the tray down on the dining table.

Too surprised to speak, she took the letter, her eyes swiftly scanning the words, eating them line by line.

The letter gave details of what he was doing and hinted at where he was ‘on-board ship somewhere in the Atlantic’. The letter was far less eloquent than the one Patrick Kelly had sent her, but she told herself it didn’t matter. All she wanted to know was whether he had mentioned her.

At last it said,

Give my best regards to Elizabeth, and tell her to keep an eye on those butchers or they’ll short change her and she’ll have to do extra errands.

Dishes, dusting and polishing didn’t require much mental effort, so as she scrubbed pots, dusted bookcases and polished the dining room table, Peter was there with her, hinting for her to give her usual excuse to meet him. She fairly floated around the house. She wanted badly to feel his presence, even if it was only to rub her cheek against his jacket or run her hand along the writing desk in his room. If his bedroom door had not been locked, she would have gone in there and lain on the bed just like they used to do when his mother was out. The door had been locked the day after he’d left for Canada, but, she reminded herself, the car was still here.

During that part of the day when Mrs Selwyn was having her afternoon nap, she crept out of the house and into the garage where Peter’s Austin Seven was kept.

Lizzie stared at it. How many afternoons had she spent in the back seat, cuddled up to Peter, her underwear on the floor and her breasts exposed to his groping hands.

On opening the rear door, the smell of polished leather
came out to greet her. Closing her eyes, she breathed it in. How wonderful it was; how much it reminded her of being half-naked against him. She guessed that his smell was still inside too. How wonderful it would be to imagine him there, beside her.

She thought about it, told herself no harm could be done, and slipped off her shoes. The temptation was too great. She climbed inside, lying full length along the back seat, closing her eyes and wrapping her arms around her own body. His smell was still here, mixed with that of the leather.

She stroked her shoulders and imagined it was Peter. A tingle of desire trickled down her throat, over her breastbone, down her arms, over her stomach and down to and between her thighs.

He mentioned me, she thought to herself, and was happy. He’d only said kind regards and to remember to order the right meat from the butcher, but that was enough. She might have been happy enough to believe that, except that she suddenly heard the sound of the letterbox. Second post! Was it possible for a second letter to arrive? They’d received so little.

She got out of the car, closing the door behind her, and made for the hallway and the letterbox. There were only two brown envelopes, but she could see through the frosted glass of the door that the post woman had stopped at the garden gate, possibly talking to someone else by the look of the other blob of colour she could see.

She opened the door. ‘Is this second post?’

The post woman shook her head. ‘No. This is the one and only post. Oh, and by the way, I’ll be late again tomorrow. Midday post only. We’ve got a bit of a backlog.’

It wasn’t until she’d closed the door that it came to her exactly what the post woman had said. There had been no first post this morning. All the day’s excitement drained out
through her toes as another thought occurred to her. If that was the case, when had the letter arrived? Surely not yesterday? Mrs Selwyn had been so anxious to show it to her, so surely she would have shown her it yesterday.

Thinking she could check the date stamp, she looked for the envelope in amongst the old newspapers and magazines they were saving. There was none. She shrugged. Perhaps Mrs Selwyn still had the envelope in her possession. Perhaps she’d placed it behind the clock on the mantelpiece, though she didn’t recall seeing it. She had to accept it as fact and leave it at that.

The pawnshop and the storeroom behind it were an Aladdin’s cave of unending discoveries. Personal items rubbed alongside hocked treasures, stuffed into cupboards regardless of tin scratching silver plate, or pewter amongst china.

The gramophone was the noticeable exception. No bits of underwear or china lurked in the cabinet beneath the green baize turntable. Obviously his uncle had enjoyed music. Wagner, Bizet, Schubert, Strauss rubbed shoulders with Puccini and Chopin, all protected in brown paper sleeves.

He searched through them avidly, his mouth almost watering with the delight of composer names, orchestras and recordings.

Discarding Wagner, he found what must have been one of the first recordings of
Madam Butterfly
. The singer’s name was unfamiliar to him, but it didn’t matter. Only the music mattered.

With something approaching reverence, he placed the record onto the soft felt of the turntable, wound the handle and carefully placed the needle on the record.

The initial scratchiness was drowned in delicate notes that tinkled like a fountain and pleased him. He would sit and listen.

He’d made himself lunch – just bread and cheese. Camp coffee he found was more palatable when laced with cream from the top of the milk plus two spoonfuls of sugar.

Balancing plate and coffee on the arm of the chair, he heaped a few records onto his lap and proceeded to look through them, sliding some onto a keep file and some for discarding. Perhaps he would sell them in the shop.

Eight records down, his fingers found the edges of a brown envelope, creased and worn with years, which had been slid between the works of Beethoven and Handel. On the outside was written ‘Summer 1912’.

Fingering the faded writing, he surmised what it might contain: family memories, photographs and birth, marriage and death certificates. Fearing what secrets it might contain, his first inclination was to destroy the contents without looking at them. Perhaps it was the music softening the residual savagery still lurking in his heart, or perhaps he was feeling more secure than when he’d first arrived, or braver, or stupid, or merely curious.

He sighed. It could be any or all of those things.

His fingers tapped the package. Do it, said a voice in his head. Do it!

Taking a deep breath like a diver before plunging headlong from the highest platform, he slid his fingers in and pulled out the contents.

They were a pile of sepia photographs, mostly what he’d expected: photographs of a man, a woman, a child. He recognised his mother and himself in some. There were dates and names on the back of each photograph.

On one he was four years old according to the notation on the reverse. He didn’t recall it being taken. He didn’t recall ever being with the man on whose knee he sat – the man he presumed was his father, his natural father, a man he had never known, but missed not doing so. There were so many truths he wanted to know.

The only father he had ever known was Heinz Deller, the
only country Germany. He didn’t even remember his short stay in Holland following his father’s death.

The people in the photographs were very formal – hardly a smile between them, their clothes stiff and dark. On closer examination he fancied the corners of his father’s mouth tilted upwards, as though trying to stem his laughter because the stiff poses amused him.