The name slipped out of her mouth before she stopped to think, and without warning she was sobbing, and being rocked in her mother’s arms as if she was a child again. Which was exactly how she felt right then, needing comfort and understanding, and getting it all in full measure.
‘I’m sorry,’ she finally gasped. ‘I thought I was coming to terms with it.’
‘And so you are. Do you think Fanny wouldn’t have wanted you to cry for her, Wenna, or to mention her name ever again? She knew your soft heart as well as any of us. And you’re right. She would have been proud of you today… So when are you going back to Betsy’s to do it all again?’ she said calmly.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Wenna with a gulp.
* * *
Oliver Pengelly, alias Jimmy Oliver, knew he was in his rightful element at last. He had been born to fly, he thought jubilantly, and his sharp-eyed abilities had been quickly discovered.
He had only been allowed up on practice jaunts so far, having had to fulfil the required number of flying hours before he could officially go on ops. He hadn’t encountered an enemy plane in his life, and he had seen the best of it without knowing what real combat was.
He knew all that, and although some of the tales his fellow erks told him were horrific, he still longed to be up there in the thick of it all, giving Jerry what for.
He was training to be a wireless operator, and his world was peppered with an even more exaggerated vocabulary now. His chums were all good eggs, they were whack-oh and spiffing types, and everything was pip-pip or wizard prangs.
And although he was still an erk – the lowest of the low – once he had done the regulation number of practice flying hours, he’d be getting a seventy-two hour leave before going on ops. He had toyed between going home and staying around to make further progress with the pretty little NAAFI girl who had given him the glad eye. But Cornwall won. He couldn’t wait for his family to see him in uniform. By now he was sure they would have forgiven him for running off the way he had.
His natural optimism bubbled to the surface every time he thought about it. It would be good to see the folks again, but even better to get back to the base. Long before Christmas he expected to become a fully-fledged member of an air crew.
It was early December before he got his leave. By then he had phoned home several times, and knew that his sister Celia was doing important war work – ‘somewhere in Norfolk’, of all places, he thought with a sardonic grin. So much for her penchant for travel. And Wenna had joined the ATS and was now attached to ENSA, entertaining the troops.
‘Good God, if that isn’t the giddy limit,’ he grinned at one of his pals after his last phone call home. ‘Wenna will be a star yet. My sisters always fall on their bloody feet.’
‘So do you, Jimmy-riddle,’ the erk jeered. ‘Even if we ditched our kite in the sea, I reckon you’d bounce up from the briny smelling of roses.’
‘More like old Neptune’s barnacles, the old fart-arse,’ sniggered another. ‘So you’re really going home this weekend, are you, Jimmy?’ he said, ducking as Olly threw a book at him.
‘I should,’ he said reluctantly. ‘I haven’t seen the parents in months, but you two just remember to keep your hands and eyes off Rosie while I’m gone, d’you hear?’
‘Well, we might keep our eyes off her, but we won’t bargain for the hands, will we, Sparks?’ the first one taunted, his words resulting in a fierce pillow-fight between the three of them in the billet.
Just like children, Olly thought, with the superiority of an eighteen-year-old, remembering the incident as the train took him westwards on that cold December morning. Just the way he and his sister had once been. Or himself and his cousins Seb and Justin. Great days. Great times.
And he was in a hell of a sloppy mood to be looking back, he told himself severely, when he had everything in the world to look forward to.
He caught the admiring look of a young woman in ATS uniform sitting opposite him in the train compartment, and gave up reminiscing and turned to more immediate matters.
By the time he left the train, he had her telephone number in his pocket and the promise of a meeting if ever their leaves coincided. He doubted he would see her again, but flirting had been fun while it lasted, and took up much of the tedious travelling time across the country. Was a seventy-two hour leave ever worth it, he found himself wondering, when half of it was taken up with getting there and getting back?
The minute he saw his parents on the station platform, he knew it was worth it. This was home, and even the smell of Cornwall was different to any other place on earth, he found himself thinking, much to his own surprise.
He felt a surge of affection welling up inside him such as he hadn’t known in months. It was a very different kind of affection from the easy-come, easy-go kind he felt for his fellow erks and the NAAFI girls. It was a fundamental affection that filled his brain with the sense that as long as everything stayed the same here, then all was right with the world…
He brushed off the stupid feeling that threatened to make his eyes water in a most unmanly way, and blamed the dampness on his cheeks on the way his mother was hugging him so tightly, as if she would never let him go.
‘I swear you’ve grown six inches, Olly,’ Skye said, ‘and you look so distinguished in your uniform!’
‘Well, thank you, ma’am,’ he said huskily, seconds before Nick too was hugging this stranger who was their son.
But what the heck? This was wartime, when everybody hugged everybody else on railway stations. Olly gave himself up to their embraces, glad above all to be home, in a way he had never expected to be after his reckless need to leave.
But once the joy of reunion was over, there was an undoubted awkwardness between them all. It was mostly on Nick’s part, still unable to fully forgive Olly for running off to enlist, while Skye overcompensated for Nick and was gushingly sweet to him in a way that both of them found completely false. Finally, Olly couldn’t take it any longer.
‘For pity’s sake, Mother, why don’t you rant and rage at me like you used to?’ he finally snapped. ‘I can’t stand much more of all this sugar and spice – in fact, a little more spice would be very welcome.’
‘You’re right,’ she said solemnly. ‘I should treat you more like Daphne does, shouldn’t I?’
He started to laugh. Daphne Hollis was still a miniature thorn in Olly’s side, an irritating burr who wanted to know everything about flying, and how it felt to have your plane blown up in the sky and if it hurt to get a bullet in your guts from a German machine-gun, and if he’d jumped out with a parachute yet…
‘She’s a half-pint pain in the arse, and I don’t know how you can stand her,’ he admitted without thinking, at which his mother rounded on him at once.
‘You can just stop that smart talk while you’re here, Oliver, and save it for your barrack-room friends. Lord knows Daphne and Butch know enough swear words already without your adding to them.’
‘Bleedin’ ’ell, it wasn’t even a swear word worth the candle,’ he muttered beneath his breath.
‘What did you say?’ Skye asked.
And then they were both laughing, both remembering Fanny Rosenbloom’s choice phrases all too well, and each reminding the other that they were two grown-ups now, and that Olly could no longer be treated as a child. The RAF had seen to that, Skye realised with a small shock.
Olly was a man now, and all her children were in uniform. And that was shocking enough for any mother to take, when it seemed like only yesterday that they were babies.
‘I’m sorry, honey. I guess I forgot who I was talking to,’ she said more solemnly, but with a twinkle in her eyes to remind him that she was still his mother, no matter how old, or how large, he got. She decided to change the conversation.
‘In case you get stifled here with Daphne and Butch hanging on to your every word, go visit Aunt Betsy—’
‘Why should I want to do that? Seb’s not home, is he?’
; ‘No, but you might want to meet some of her lodgers. Before Wenna joined up she got slightly friendly with a Group Captain in the RAF. He said he didn’t know you.’
‘Well, he wouldn’t. We don’t know everybody else in the Services,’ Olly said uneasily. ‘But actually, it’s time I came clean about that, Mother. I know I’ve only made the occasional telephone call home all these months, but I think it’s time I gave you my name and number, so you can write to me.’
‘Well, I should think I know your name by now,’ Skye began with a laugh.
‘No, you don’t. Not my RAF name, anyway. It’s James Oliver, Mom. I couldn’t risk you tracing me and dragging me back home, and I discovered it was incredibly easy to rig some false papers. Sorry,’ he added more jerkily. ‘You didn’t know you had a forger for a son, did you?’
She stared at him steadily, hearing his voice shake a little and seeing how the colour warmed his young face. And she knew that whatever he had done to get himself into the air force, he was still desperate for her approval.
She put her arms around him and gave him a quick hug before she let him go. Physically and metaphorically, she thought swiftly.
‘None of it matters, darling, as long as I still have a son. Just come home safe and sound.’
Chapter Six
‘So your lot have come in at last,’ Nick said to Skye a week later, when the tumultuous news of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor had screamed out of every wireless news bulletin and newspaper headline, and caused America and Great Britain to declare war on Japan.
‘My lot?’ she echoed, still grieving that Olly’s leave had been so short, and still wondering about the right time to tell Nick of their son’s ruse to evade detection, which she privately thought quite cute. She wasn’t sure what Nick would think, with his lawyer’s ethics. It hadn’t seemed important enough at the time to spoil Olly’s leave by finding out, but she knew she couldn’t keep it to herself for ever.
Right now, it took a moment for her to realise what Nick was getting at. America had kept out of the war in Europe as long as possible – and rightly so, in her opinion. It hadn’t been their war, but now it legitimately was.
But Skye had felt so integrated in Cornish ways for so many years now that it came as a shock to hear Nick speak so.
‘You’re not going to deny your own birthplace, are you?’
‘No. But I’m not denying my roots, either, and they’re most definitely here,’ she said smartly. ‘Anyway, since the girls here seem to think that every American comes straight out of Hollywood, it will keep them starry-eyed once they start sending troops over.’
‘I hope you’re not implying that our own boys can’t do that. Tell that to Olly.’
‘Actually, Nick, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you about Olly,’ she said carefully, hoping that his mind was so full of the terrible news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and all its implications that Olly’s small deception wouldn’t seem so terrible after all.
‘He did what?’ he exploded. ‘Of all the deceitful young pups. I’ve a good mind to call the War Office and get him hauled over the coals.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Nick,’ Skye snapped. ‘Can’t you for once admire his initiative and let it go at that? What’s the point, anyway? He’s over eighteen now—’
‘The point is, he enlisted under false pretences, and he’s living a lie in continuing with this false identity. If you don’t understand the wrongdoing in all that, Skye, then I begin to wonder if I know you at all.’
‘After all these years of marriage?’ she said, appalled to realise how very narrow-minded he was being in all this, and desperate to lighten the atmosphere between them.
‘Sometimes I wonder if we ever really get to know another person properly,’ he said savagely. ‘In my profession, I see far too many people living by their wits and cunning. I simply never expected my son to be one of them.’
It was on the tip of her tongue to blurt out the words she had said once before that had cut him deeply. That Oliver wasn’t Nick’s son at all, except by adoption.
She managed to resist the damning retort with a huge effort, and she spoke more pleadingly, swallowing her own pride in an effort to save Olly’s.
‘Nick, can’t you see what it would do to Olly if you betrayed him over this? Couldn’t you see how proud he was of his uniform when he was home? Our boy’s a man now, honey, and if you take that away from him, he’ll never forgive you.’ She paused. ‘And neither will I.’
He didn’t answer for a moment, and she could see he was struggling with the damnable conscience that made him such a good lawyer, and such a difficult father at times.
‘I’ll let it go for the present, while I think about it,’ he said at last. ‘But I want you to know it’s for your sake as much as his. I can never sanction what he did, but I wouldn’t want to see you shamed over this, Skye.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, with more humility in her voice than was her usual style. But what was the loss of a little personal pride, when Olly’s future was at stake?
And underneath it all, she knew there was something else destined to keep her head held high. Unbelievably, there were still folk in the close-knit clayworking community who still thought of her as the American upstart, even though she had lived among them for more than half her life, and had shared in their war the first time around. All her children were involved in this one, and now her compatriots were in it too.
Anyway, she thought, with an immense surge of pride that was as backhanded as it was tragic – had Cornwall ever been bombed? Let anyone dare sneer at her after Pearl Harbor… especially the clayworkers with their closeted outlook that couldn’t see a world beyond the glittering sky-tips and the barren moors.
She didn’t know why she thought particularly about the clayworkers at that time. Killigrew Clay had been out of their personal control for a long time now, and she had no contact with the company of Bokilly Holdings that had amalgamated the clayworks of Killigrew Clay with that of Bourne and Yelland.
Nick was still the associated company lawyer, of course, and occasionally reported talks of threatened strikes and squabbles, and the precariousness of the business as a whole, but none of that was new. It was the way it had always been.
Skye rarely visited the White Rivers Pottery nowadays, and she was sometimes alarmed at how easily her interest in it had dissipated. Once it had been all important in her life, just as the clayworks had been to her family. She must visit it again sometime, she vowed. Nick’s brother Adam and her nephew Seb had bought it out, so it was still very much in the family. Butch Butcher was always asking how pots were made too, and she might take him and Daphne up there sometime.
She hadn’t lost all interest, she told herself somewhat guiltily, and she still worked sporadically on the history of Killigrew Clay, trying not to overdo her family’s involvement in it. But she felt she owed it to past generations, as well as future ones, to keep the history alive, and she sometimes regretted that she had been impetuous enough to burn all her grandmother’s diaries without reading them properly.
She gave a heavy sigh, knowing it had seemed so right and so noble at the time, and in her heart she still knew it had been right. Morwen Tremayne’s thoughts and dreams had been private, the way everyone’s were.
They were the only truly private things a person had – and Skye knew that those had been Morwen’s sentiments too. It was a pity, though, to have lost all of that. Just like Fanny Rosenbloom, who had left nothing but memories – it was as if she had never been.
Skye shivered, telling herself such a thought was nonsense. Anyway, how could Morwen Tremayne’s ghost ever be destroyed completely, while the descendants who were her true legacy lived on – and while the clay was still gouged out of the earth, and the sky-tips still soared like gleaming white mountains towards the sky? No matter how the world changed, some things would always remain constant, Skye told herself.
By the time Nick sought her ou
t later her thoughts had returned to Olly. Everyone else had gone to bed long ago, but she was still restless, still full of too many perceptions she wished she could dispel. Nick wrapped his arms around her and kissed her cheek, and she leaned against him with a sigh.
‘About Olly, my love,’ he said gently. ‘We’ll let things remain as they are. What harm can it do, after all, and what difference will it make to the outcome of a war?’
‘What difference indeed,’ she murmured, lifting her face for his kiss and feeling a surge of relief at his words. ‘I do love you, Nick.’
‘And I love you, my beautiful witch, in case you thought there was ever any doubt.’
‘I didn’t,’ she said huskily. ‘So why don’t we go to bed and sleep on it?’
‘That wasn’t quite what I had in mind,’ he said, his voice full of a seductive note she couldn’t mistake, and didn’t want to, anyway.
* * *
The news that Sebastian Tremayne’s particular war was over came as a great shock to most of his family, and a huge, guilty relief to his mother.
‘I just can’t help it, Skye,’ Betsy wept over the phone. ‘I know you shouldn’t be glad to know your son’s been wounded, but they say ’tis not putting him at death’s door, and at least I’ll have him home again and out of harm’s way. What kind of a mother could be sorry about that?’
‘Nobody could condemn you for thinking that way, Betsy. It’s perfectly natural,’ Skye soothed her. ‘So what exactly do they say about Sebby?’
She realised they were both speaking about him as if he was a child and had to refer to others to discuss his war wounds, but she let the thought pass. What the heck did any of that matter, as long as Sebby wasn’t mortally wounded?
‘They say the leg will heal in time, but the bullets severed some vital nerves, and he’ll always have an acute limp. He’s shell-shocked as well, so they won’t let him go back to his unit at all, and they’re going to keep him in this French hospital for a spell yet. Justin says we’ll all have to be patient with Sebby when he comes home, as he’ll probably be feeling very bitter about coming back to civvy street. But he’s done his bit for King and Country, so I daresay he’ll be more than glad to be out of it. Why should he be bitter?’
A Brighter Tomorrow Page 10