by Anne Bennett
Janet was glad she’d arranged with Lou and Shirley to go back a little earlier than the official start of term so that they could give the flat a good clean. It wasn’t in all honesty terribly dirty, but Janet, surveying it, said, ‘It’s a bit dingy.’
Lou and Shirley agreed. ‘Maybe it will look better after a clean,’ Shirley suggested.
They set to with a will with lots of soapy water, scrubbing brushes and great enthusiasm, and at the end of it, the place didn’t look much better. The paintwork was dull brown and reminiscent of the pre-war years, and the hideous cheap paper was yellow and patchy with age. The lino was stained, pitted and cracked and the curtains were filthy dirty. ‘I’d be afraid to wash them,’ Janet said. ‘I think the dirt’s holding them together.’
Shirley’s parents came to inspect the place. Shirley’s father had put up key money and the first month’s rent the landlord had demanded to secure the flat, and though the girls were able to pay him back later from their grants, he wanted to see the place too. ‘It’s a bit grim,’ Shirley confessed to her mother.
‘Not at all, darling,’ her mother said reassuringly. ‘Many people start out with much worse.’
‘But it’s all so dull.’
‘Nothing a spot of paint won’t put right,’ Shirley’s father said. ‘It just needs brightening up.’
‘Rugs can cover the worst bits of the lino,’ Shirley’s mother said. ‘And shelves in the alcoves for your bits and pieces, and of course new curtains.’
Janet stared at them in amazement. They hadn’t got that sort of money. Then Shirley’s mother, who was over at the window, suddenly said, ‘I’ll make new curtains for you if you’d like me to. It will be a gift to you all, my moving-in present.’
By the time term began, the flat was almost unrecognisable from the one they’d first visited. The walls were painted white, the woodwork sunshine yellow. Curtains with large yellow sunflowers on them fluttered at the kitchen windows and those of the bedroom the three girls shared. The curtains in the living room were gold and muted green in swirling patterns, and Shirley’s mother had made a matching throwover to hide the sagging three-piece. They’d paid the landlady’s son a small amount to put natural-wood shelves in the alcoves, and Shirley’s parents had found a number of rugs they said they had no use for that covered the worst bits of the lino. The girls pooled their resources, for while Lou and Shirley got an allowance to eke out their grants, Janet had her wages, and went hunting for things to make the flat more homely.
They bought a carpet remnant that nearly covered the bedroom floor, a second-hand wicker ottoman to hold their jumpers, and colourful bedspreads to make their beds look better. They searched the junk shops for cheap lamps for muted lighting in the living room and bedroom, and filled the place with plants. Shirley had brought her record player and collection of records and put it in one alcove, while the other housed books, with a large desk built beneath them.
They were all incredibly proud of having their own place. It was rather daring of them and some of those they left behind in the hostel said they thought they were rather fast. Lou said they were just jealous, and Janet thought if she hadn’t have got out when she did, she’d have given Mrs McPhearson the length of her tongue or worse. She had to admit though that without Shirley’s parents’ contributions, the flat wouldn’t have been so nice. It was on the third floor, like their room in the hostel, but they had their own kitchen and bathroom, and two other rooms which they used as a living room and communal bedroom. The place was so central, too, just a short walk away from the town centre and the railway station, and yet within easy reach of the university as there was a short cut across Victoria Park.
Excitedly, Janet described it all to her parents in the pay phone on the ground floor, but their enthusiasm was muted, not really sure whether it was the done thing for young unmarried girls to live alone. However, the girls had no such qualms and threw a house-warming party. It was a great success and many were envious of the place they had entirely to themselves. Janet wished her parents could see it, she just knew they would be so proud of her.
The day after the party there was a knock at the door, and Janet opened it to a young man she remembered talking to the evening before. He had light-brown hair that went back in a quiff, and deep-hazel eyes, and he was tall and slim. She remembered that he had a ready laugh.
‘Hello,’ he said, ‘remember me?’
‘Of course,’ Janet said. ‘Simon, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right, Simon Webster. I’ve brought the book I told you about.’
‘Come in,’ Janet said. She remembered they’d discussed literature for a long time and Simon had told her about The Diary of Anne Frank, which had been published that year. She’d remembered Ruth’s story of the Russian pogroms and said she’d like to read it.
She made coffee and they sat in the kitchen and talked. Janet couldn’t remember talking like that for ages. It was the way she’d once confided in Claire and Ruth. Now she was discussing every subject under the sun with a young man she’d just met and who she felt completely at home with.
She agreed to go to the cinema with him the following evening, and once he’d gone, she settled down to read the book he’d brought, glad that for once she had the place to herself. As she read, she sensed the agitation of the young girl hiding with her family and a few friends in Amsterdam. It was such an unnatural and fear-filled adolescence she was forced to endure because of her race and religion.
Janet could only imagine the terror that would have possessed them all when the Gestapo screeched to a halt outside their hiding place. There would have been screams and shouts from those below as they sought to pretend ignorance of the sealed-up room. How did a young girl cope with the dread feeling that would descend on her as she heard the storm troopers’ boots pound on the stairs and kick open the room to their little sanctuary?
When Janet finished the book she lay back, overcome with sadness at the futility of it all. She’d severed her friendship with Ruth solely because she’d had an association with her brother, who’d let her down and married another, and she was ashamed of herself. I’m like the kings of old, she thought, who’d kill the messenger who brought bad tidings. She realised that Ruth had a point about the persecution of the Jews; even the embittered old grandmother maybe had just cause to feel hard done by.
Knowing that it was up to her to heal the rift between them, Janet took up her pen twice during the next fortnight to write to Ruth, but couldn’t find the words.
The matter still had not been resolved by the time she returned home for Duncan’s twenty-first birthday party. He expressed surprise to Janet that Ruth hadn’t been invited, and Janet admitted, ‘I don’t see her any more.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, we … sort of drifted apart … you know, with going to different universities …’ Janet’s voice faded away and Duncan could recognise her floundering and feeble excuses only too well.
‘Don’t give me that, Jan,’ he said. ‘I was away over two years, but when I came home on leave, my mates were still my mates, and now we’re all together again.’ He stopped a minute and said: ‘This isn’t anything to do with Ben, is it?’
The denial was on Janet’s lips, but she could not deliver it because she knew she could not do it emphatically enough to be believed. Her silence was equally damning.
‘God, Jan,’ Duncan burst out. ‘Ruth’s hardly her brother’s keeper.’
‘I know,’ Janet snapped. ‘Why do you have to be so … so … oh, I don’t know, such a Mr Big Head?’
Duncan burst out laughing. ‘Me, Janet Travers?’ he exclaimed. ‘You’ve got a nerve. That’s the cap that fits you nicely, Miss Clever Clogs 1955, and still you can’t give me a decent reason why your good friend Ruth Hayman’s in the dog house.’
Because I don’t have a good reason, Janet might have said.
Betty and Bert were confused by the girls never meeting again once university started. Jane
t had kept a lot of the unpleasant things about Ben’s defection from them, and they were unaware of his marriage, or what had happened at Chloe’s funeral. They knew the girls had drifted apart and considered that natural, but didn’t realise the split was so final.
In issuing the invitation to Janet, Betty had said, ‘Bring someone if you like.’
‘What kind of someone?’
‘You know, if there’s anyone special.’
‘There isn’t,’ Janet said, and thought of Simon. He was special, she supposed, and she was very fond of him, but she couldn’t just present him at her home, not yet. Anyway, she thought, the Travers en masse were enough to frighten anyone to death. Simon would have to be introduced slowly, if at all. He’d been quite annoyed with her when she’d told him that she was going to her brother’s twenty-first alone.
‘Aren’t I invited?’ he’d asked.
‘No,’ Janet answered. ‘Why should you be?’
‘Well, we are going out together.’
‘Yes,’ Janet said, ‘just that, not yet joined at the hip.’
‘Look here, Janet,’ Simon said, ‘if you were to tell your parents …’
‘Tell them what?’
‘That we’re an item, for Christ’s sake,’ Simon burst out. ‘I’d like to meet them, and your brothers and sister.’
‘You don’t meet people at a party,’ Janet said.
‘Well, let me come and meet them the weekend before.’
‘No.’
‘Christ, Janet, you can be damned obstinate.’
‘What’s this thing about my bloody family?’ Janet cried. ‘We’re only going out together, for God’s sake.’
Simon shrugged. ‘You talk about them all the time and I’d just like to put faces to the names, that’s all.’ He’d forced himself to speak casually. What he would have liked to say was that he loved Janet, was crazy about her and would like to meet the family he might one day be related to. Lou had warned him that to declare his love and serious intent was a surefire way of putting Janet off.
Janet looked at him, considering what he’d said, and commented, ‘I might take you one day.’
‘Great,’ Simon said sarcastically. ‘Don’t put yourself out.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Do you know how annoying you are?’ Simon asked, and added threateningly, ‘You’ll push me too far one of these days.’
Janet’s eyes narrowed. ‘Well, if you don’t like the way I treat you, you know the way out.’
Lou and Shirley shook their heads over Janet and her treatment of Simon Webster, but Janet was unrepentant.
‘He can take it or leave it,’ she said.
Lou and Shirley weren’t invited to Duncan’s party either, though Betty had suggested Janet ask her flatmates.
‘They have a pretty heavy social schedule,’ Janet explained, not altogether truthfully. She couldn’t understand why she didn’t want Lou and Shirley at that party. It was as if she was trying to keep her two lives separate, and yet it wasn’t only that. If they were to meet her family, she wanted them to do it on an ordinary weekend, not one with a party in progress which might give them the wrong impression of everyone.
‘Well, ask Ruth then,’ Betty suggested. ‘I’m sure she’d like to come and wish Duncan all the best on his coming-of-age.’
‘Mom, I haven’t seen Ruth since I began university,’ Janet said.
‘Yes, but that was just circumstances, wasn’t it?’ Betty said. ‘You know, with you both going to different universities and so on.’
‘Not entirely, Mom, no.’
‘Yes, but …’
‘Mom, Ruth won’t be coming,’ Janet said, and Betty didn’t argue further, but she did say to Bert and Duncan that evening:
‘Has our Janet had a fall-out with Ruth, do either of you know?’
‘They’ve never had a real fall-out, have they?’ Bert said. ‘Thick as thieves they were as youngsters.’
‘So she’s said nothing to you?’
‘No,’ Bert said. ‘I know she sees less of her now, but that’s just growing up, isn’t it?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Betty. ‘What I am sure of, young Duncan, is that Ruth won’t be over for your party to wish you well.’
‘I’ll survive,’ Duncan said lightly, but he’d been determined to discover from Janet what it was all about.
He found out very little, except that Janet’s unfriendliness with Ruth was somehow connected with her brother. All Duncan knew was that Ben had become engaged to his sister and then changed his mind, because he had the offer of a job in America. It seemed eminently sensible to him not to hold someone to a commitment when they were going to live on another continent for a while. Anyway, Janet wouldn’t have been able to marry for years and years. She’d been just at the start of her university course. Duncan stopped trying to work out his sister’s love life and gave himself up to enjoying his party, and within a few hours he couldn’t remember anyone having a problem at all.
Simon was livid when Janet announced on her return that she would be going back home for the next two weekends.
‘But why?’
‘My young brothers are sitting an exam to get into technical school,’ Janet explained. ‘I found out in the summer when I was home. They have extra homework and I said I’d give them a hand weekends, till the exams are over.’
‘Why you?’ Simon asked. ‘What about their teachers?’
‘They can’t give them extra time. The classes are too large,’ Janet said. ‘And I had the chance. My teacher gave up her free time for me, and without her help I’d never have got to grammar school and wouldn’t be here now today. I promised my sister when she was just a baby that I’d help her, but now my two brothers are down for it first.’
‘It’s a problem she has,’ Shirley told a lonely Simon the first weekend. ‘She feels almost guilty about the educational opportunity she had offered to her, and has spent the rest of her life making it up to her family.’
Janet was so busy with her university course, working with her brothers and seeing Simon as often as he could convince her to go out with him that she put aside her worry about Ruth, and what, if anything, she could do about her, until the end of November. Then she broached the problem with her flatmates.
‘Simon said I should contact her,’ she said. ‘What do you two think?’
‘Send her a Christmas card with a note inside,’ suggested Shirley.
‘She’s Jewish.’
‘Oh yes, so she is.’
‘Well,’ said Lou, ‘send her a note anyway. Something low key but friendly.’
Janet tried, but the notes came out either too stiff and formal or too inane for words. The term was coming to an end. There was the usual end-of-term flurry and last-minute things to do, and when Janet set off for the Christmas holidays, she still hadn’t made any contact with Ruth Hayman.
The Haymans’ house had never struck her before as unfriendly, nor the door as forbidding. But two days into the Christmas holidays, Janet stood before it with her knees quaking. She almost turned around and went home, but she knew that would be a stupid thing to do when she’d got so far. She hoped and prayed that the crabby old grandmother wouldn’t answer the door. Not that she’d ever seen her do that – she would deem it beneath her – but still she waited with clammy hands and a dry mouth.
Relief flooded through Janet when she saw that it was Ruth who stood in the doorway. She didn’t seem pleased to see Janet, though her mouth dropped open in surprise. She wondered what the other girl wanted, for their last encounter had been pretty awful, but she said nothing and just waited for Janet to speak.
‘Hello, Ruth.’
‘H … hello.’ Ruth stared at the girl she’d been friends with since they were both twelve years old. She noticed she was shivering, and was suddenly aware of the icy chill of the day.
‘Come in,’ she said, throwing the door wide.
‘Is it all right?’ Janet said. ‘Your parents? You
r grandmother?’
‘My grandmother has broken her hip,’ Ruth said. ‘She slipped last week on the ice. My parents are visiting her in hospital at the moment. I’m on my own.’
‘Oh,’ Janet said. ‘Is she badly hurt, your grandmother?’ She felt she had to ask.
‘Bad enough, I think,’ Ruth said, ‘but why should you care?’
‘Well, I … I mean, you …’
‘I don’t care really,’ Ruth said. ‘I’m more relieved she’s out of the way for a while. It’s been so peaceful these last few days. I don’t want her to die or anything awful, just stay out of our hair for a bit and give Mom, in particular, a bit of a rest.’
Janet didn’t know what to say to that. She’d be worried to death if it was her own grandmother, but then Mrs McClusky was nothing like the elder Mrs Hayman. Ruth was watching her, and the silence became uncomfortable. Eventually Janet said, ‘Can we talk, Ruth?’
‘What about?’ Ruth was defensive.
‘Ruth, we were once good friends.’
‘Yes,’ Ruth said flatly, ‘we were.’
The draughty hall was cold and Janet suddenly gave a shudder. ‘It’s always cold in here,’ Ruth said apologetically, and added almost grudgingly, ‘We could go in the kitchen. It will be warmer, and I suppose I could make us a drink.’
It was on the tip of Janet’s tongue to say ‘Don’t strain yourself’ but she managed to stop herself. What did you expect! she told herself as she followed Ruth along the passage to the kitchen. That she’d fall on your neck in base gratitude that you’ve deigned to remember her existence again?
She waited until Ruth had made two cups of coffee, pushed one across the table and indicated that they should sit down. Then she spoke. ‘I wanted to say I was sorry. I was out of order and wrong to say what I did at Chloe’s funeral. I was overwrought.’
‘Ben said you were,’ Ruth said. ‘I was annoyed with you, and upset, but he said we should make allowances.’
‘Ben did?’
‘Yes,’ said Ruth, and then burst out, ‘This is all about Ben, isn’t it, all this antagonism towards me?’
‘Well … yes, yes, it is – or was,’ Janet agreed. ‘I was annoyed with you because you came and told me about his marriage. I know it was illogical and stupid. It seemed as if you were on his side.’