‘I’m early, as you’d know if you ever answered your telephone.’
‘Have you been ringing me? Sorry, Grandma, I switched it to vibrate-only last night and forgot to switch it back to the ringtone this morning.’
‘Vibrate, ringtone? I have no idea what you’re talking about. Well, are you going to leave me standing here all day?’
Jess looked over her shoulder and grimaced at Bradley. ‘It’s Grandma,’ she mouthed.
Bradley stood frozen to the spot as Jess eased the door open to allow Martha to gain access.
He tugged at the pink belt to tighten it. ‘Hello, Mrs Crew,’ he spluttered.
Martha gave him a withering glare, then looked Jess up and down.
‘Do you always answer the door half naked?’
‘I am wearing PJs, Grandma.’
‘You’d at least look decent if you wore that.’ She pointed up at Bradley who turned around and hurried up the stairs to get dressed.
‘Come through, Grandma,’ said Jess, leading the way to the lounge. ‘Would you like a coffee? I’m just making—’
Martha looked across the room to where Jess’s underwear lay in an untidy heap on the carpet. ‘It doesn’t take a genius to see what’s been going on here.’
‘Oh, Grandma. I am entitled to a private life you know? I’m not married or anything.’
‘In my day, you got married before you even thought about removing your underwear for a man, and even then, you did it in private, or under the bedclothes.’
Jess bit her tongue, just managing to stop herself reminding Martha that this wasn’t ‘her day’.
‘Times have changed, Grandma. We have different standards now.’
‘None of them are an improvement on what went before.’ Martha looked back towards the stairs. ‘It didn’t take you long to find someone new to climb into bed with, did it? You’ve only been on your own for five minutes.’
‘Look, I’m not going to argue with you, Grandma. What do you want? I thought I was picking you up at eleven.’
‘Marjorie has a dentist appointment at eleven. The silly woman didn’t tell me about it until this morning.’
‘Can’t she go on her own?’
‘MARJORIE!’ Martha looked incredulous. ‘You couldn’t trust her to find the place, let alone go inside, have the treatment and come home again. She’s hopeless.’
‘Maybe you should slacken the reins a bit,’ suggested Jess. ‘A little independence would do her good.’
‘Don’t tell me what she is, or isn’t capable of, young lady. You can’t imagine the chaos that would ensue if I left her to her own devices.’
Martha scowled as Bradley appeared at the lounge doorway.
‘And you… you should be ashamed of yourself.’
Bradley looked genuinely puzzled. ‘What have I done wrong?’
‘You’ve taken advantage of my granddaughter who has only just broken up with her long-term partner. You’re a professional man… allegedly… and she is your client.’
Bradley picked up his jacket, patted the pockets to find his car keys, then gave Jess a peck on the lips.
‘I’ll call you later.’ Fixing Martha with a tight smile, he let himself out of the house.
As soon as the front door closed, Martha resumed her attack.
‘I don’t know, Jessica, what were you thinking?’
‘I’m sorry to be such a disappointment, Grandma. But I have my own life to live and I’ll live it as I see fit. Now, are we going to have our little chat?’
Martha looked at the big clock on the wall and shook her head. ‘I’m not in the mood now. You can give me a lift back home; I’m not paying for another taxi.’
Jess sighed and turned towards the stairs.
‘And make yourself look half decent at least.’ Martha ordered. ‘Most of your backside is hanging out of those shorts.’
Twenty minutes later, Jess had dropped Martha off at home and had returned to the farm. She showered and dressed in some comfortable old clothes for a day of research and notetaking on her computer. First, she sketched out a rough outline of the two articles she had been contracted to write and to which she intended to expand on that afternoon, but after lunch, as she was washing up, she gazed out over what used to be a busy farmyard and her thoughts turned back to Alice.
‘I’m sure you wouldn’t have had a go at me for having my backside hanging out of my shorts, Nana.’
She laughed to herself. Although Alice held some very old-fashioned values herself, her views on female sexuality, hadn’t counted among them. Alice had been a sexually liberated female before the term had been invented. Martha would have been outraged at the thought of her mother seducing her lawyer in his own office, and if she thought Jess’s shorts were indecent, what would she have made of Alice going out on a date without bothering to pull on her knickers?
Jess sat down at the table and opened up her laptop only to see the dreaded blue light come on as soon as she lifted the lid. She immediately thought back to her conversation of the night before, picked up her phone and called Wade.
‘Hello, Jess.’
‘Hi, Wade, I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time.’
‘No, it’s cool. How can I help you?’
‘I’ve been thinking about the spyware that could be on my computer. You said you’d only need it for a day or so. Could I book you to have a look at it, please?’
‘Of course, I could drop by tomorrow lunchtime. I can’t do it tonight; I have a hot date.’
Jess almost clapped with relief. ‘Well done! You see, you weren’t doing anything wrong. You just had to meet the right girl at the right time.’
‘She’s a cracker too,’ Wade boasted. ‘I met her this morning at Costa, she works there.’
‘Well, I hope you have a lovely night out. Where are you taking her?’
‘The Computer Games Fair in Gillingham. She’s a mad gamer too.’
‘Fabulous, looks like you were made for each other. I’m hopeless at computer games.’
‘We wouldn’t have got on then,’ said Wade, seriously. ‘I’m a gamer first and a lover second.’
‘Thank goodness we didn’t click then,’ replied Jess. ‘One of us would have been very disappointed.’
Jess moved her mouse around the screen and found it hovering over the notes she had made from Alice’s memoirs.
‘I won’t lose any work, will I? I have a lot of files on here that are really precious to me.’
‘Back it up before I call. I’ll do a secondary back-up of docs and pics before I start work. It should be fine though. I think we’re talking basic tracker software here, not ransomware or anything like that.’
‘Ransomware? I’ve read about that,’ Jess replied. ‘Pay up or lose the contents of your computer forever. Why do people want to do such things?’
‘Greed. It’s as simple as that.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘Right, I’ll see you at lunchtime tomorrow.’
‘Have a lovely gaming night,’ said Jess, pressing the red button on her screen to end the call.
Returning her attention to her computer, Jess opened the folder containing the two article projects, created a new, blank document in her word processor and typed in a title. ARE THE TIMES REALLY CHANGING? She pressed the enter key then typed a subtitle. Society’s Reaction To The Female Sexual Revolution. 1939-2019.
Satisfied with the working title, Jess saved the document and began to think about the opening line. Ten minutes later, with nothing more on the page, she closed the document, opened Alice’s Memoir and turned to the last chapter in the 1939 notebook. She ran her hand over the page written in Alice’s beautiful script, opened her own jotter, and made a new heading.
December 1939
The month started out rather mild, weather-wise, and we thought we were in for another in a run of warmish Decembers, but by the second week the temperature began to drop and we had heavy frosts and freezing fog at night. The fog hardly cleared during the dayligh
t hours which meant the sort of work we could do on the farm was very restricted. When an eight mile stretch of the Thames froze over, people were, at first, relieved as they thought it would stop the Germans sailing up the river to attack London. We also breathed more easily knowing the fog would hamper the Luftwaffe’s efforts to bomb us into submission.
The farm’s finances were helped by only having eight farm workers to pay for being mostly idle. I deliberately left Miriam out of that statement because she didn’t have a minute of the day in which to take a breather. The two new recruits to our family, Stephen and Harriet, had settled in well but with the weather as it was, their activities were limited and they were desperate for some outdoor time to enable them to burn off all that excess energy.
When I came in one morning from cleaning out the pigs, I was almost knocked over by Stephen as he ran laps of the kitchen pretending to be Godfrey Brown, the athlete who had won a gold medal for Britain in Hitler’s 1936 Olympic Games.
Hearing the name Godfrey made me think of my Gangster Lawyer who I had seen nothing of since he departed for Chatham a few weeks before but, as if I had suddenly developed the ability to use telepathy, less than two minutes later the telephone rang.
‘Alice?’
My heart swelled. ‘Godfrey? I was just thinking about you. How are you? How is training going? Are they feeding you well? Have they made you a General yet?’
Godfrey laughed.
‘They turned me down, Alice. For military service at least. I found out this morning. They noticed my limited fighting skills and decided that my efforts would be better suited to activities elsewhere.’
I jumped up and down in excitement. ‘So, where are they sending you?’
‘I am to liaise between The War Office, the Home Office, and local councils in the Kent area. Apparently, my ability to understand legalise, makes me indispensable in this field. Basically, I will have to explain government orders and regulations to local officials who will put them into practice. I’ll basically be doing my old job, but for much less money. I do get a uniform to wear though, so I can pretend I’m doing my bit.’
Godfrey sounded so disappointed. I hurried to reassured hm.
‘Of course you’ll be doing your bit, and I’m so relieved to have you carrying a fountain pen around instead of a rifle. I honestly can’t see you with a Lee Enfield in your hands.’
‘Nor could the army,’ said Godfrey, ‘especially when I hit everything but the targets on the rifle range. The instructor asked me if I was Hitler’s secret weapon.’
I tried to hold back a laugh, but gave in.
‘Oh, Godfrey. I know you think you missed out in the last war, but honestly, at nearly forty, I think you should really sit this one out too. Wasn’t forty the upper age limit?’
‘Near enough. Forty-one, I think.’
I did my best to make light of it all. ‘Well then, they’d probably have invalided you out because of your great age inside a year anyway.’
‘Add in the fact that they wanted me to shoot at the enemy, not the blokes around me.’
‘Don’t be disappointed, Godfrey, think of your family, they’ll be pleased to have you safe at home.’
‘My son says he won’t be able to face his friends at school because most of their fathers are going to fight.’
‘They won’t be so happy when they can’t sleep at night, worrying about them,’ I replied.
‘Do you know, Alice, I rather get the impression that you don’t like the idea of this war.’
‘You’d be right if you thought that, Godfrey. I understand why we’re doing it and I’ll back our lads all the way, but I don’t have to like it. I’m so pleased you were given a desk job. I can’t tell you how pleased. I’ve worried about you since the day you told me you were joining up.’
Godfrey was silent for a while. When he spoke, his voice was broken.
‘I missed you terribly, Alice. I thought about you every night in the barracks and I will be honest, when they told me today that I wasn’t needed at the front, my first thought was of you. Not my wife… You. Does that make me a bad person?’
My own voice suddenly broke up.
‘No… it makes you Godfrey, my Gangster Lawyer. Will you be spending a lot of time in London? Will we still be able to meet now and then?’
‘I will spend a fair bit of time in Westminster… but, I know a couple of very nice hotels nearby if you could find the odd free weekend.’
‘Just name a date, I’ll be there.’ I had never been to London even though my only surviving, adult relative lived there.
‘It’ll be a bit hairy when the bombs start to fall,’ he said.
‘It will just add to the excitement,’ I said, confidently.
‘That’s my girl.’ Godfrey sounded a little happier. ‘I’d, er, better go. I’ve got a lift on an army truck and it’s leaving in ten minutes.’
I blew a kiss down the phone. ‘Travel safely, Godfrey. I hope to see you before you set off for London.’
‘Count on it,’ he said.
By Christmas, the weather had taken an even bigger turn for the worst and we were suffering the lowest temperatures for forty-five years. I arranged to meet Godfrey, one freezing-cold Thursday afternoon, but our tryst was called off because the train he was supposed to catch was cancelled due to ice on the lines.
Our Christmas party was a very subdued affair. My remaining workers felt a sense of guilt for not at least offering to take up arms themselves, even though Barney and George were in their late fifties and the rest were over conscription age. They couldn’t look the wives of our missing workers in the face, even though the ladies in question let them know from the start that they didn’t think of them as lesser men. Emily Tomkiss, Benny’s young, pregnant wife, had us all in tears when she announced that she knew Benny was well because, not only could she feel it in her own heart, the baby could feel it in its heart too. ‘He’s coming home to us, I know it,’ she said, to a round of loud applause.
By eight o’clock, the temperature had dropped so low that the farmyard wasn’t safe to walk on. Icy cow pats and splashes of pig mess, which we hadn’t been able to wash away because the water from the hose froze almost as soon as it hit the floor, made our usual, farmyard-party impossible. So, instead of the roaring brazier outside, we spent our time crowded into the kitchen, huddled around our pot-bellied stove. We still sang our favourite Christmas carols and the kids caused havoc playing games of blind man’s buff and pin the tail on the donkey (though instead of a tail and a donkey we had a newspaper cutting of old Adolph, and the idea was to pin his silly little moustache onto it). When the game was over, we ceremonially tossed his picture onto the stove and we all cheered as we watched it burn.
Chapter 30
Wade was as good as his word and at exactly one o’clock on Thursday lunchtime, he arrived at the farm to pick up Jess’s laptop.
Jess unplugged it from the charging cable, saved her work and passed it to him.
‘So, how was the big date?’
Wade grinned. ‘We had a great time, thanks. We teamed up and played the new version of Black Ops Armageddon, it hasn’t been released to the public yet.’
‘Did you win?’
‘Slaughtered all-comers. We made a great team.’ Wade puffed out his chest to emphasise the point.
‘Love at first fight then.’ Jess grinned at her own joke.
Wade nodded seemingly missing the gag.
‘So, when are you seeing her again?’
‘We’re hooking up remotely tonight to play Call of Duty, Modern Warfare.’
‘Remotely?’
‘Yeah, we want to get to know each other’s tactics properly before we go any further.’
Jess frowned. ‘Oh, right, well, good luck with your bourgeoning relationship. I wish you many hours of happy slaughter.’
Wade grinned again. ‘Thanks. I think this might be fate lending a hand. I wondered why I couldn’t pull, recently. This was meant to happ
en, I think.’
He carried the laptop out to his car, placed it in a padded bag in the foot well of the passenger side of the vehicle, then walked around to the driver’s side.
‘I’ll get it back as soon as I can. I know you need it ASAP.’
‘I’d really appreciate that, Wade. I have a couple of important articles to write up and there’s a deadline looming.’
As Wade powered off up the lane to the ear-splitting noise of the drum and base, Jess closed the door and walked through to the lounge. She had been trying to psyche herself up all morning to make a second visit to the attic. She had finished reading the 1939 memoir and the 1940 notebook, along with the ones that covered the rest of the war, were in a tea chest in the far corner of the loft.
Jess found the room unnerving to say the least. She had heard so much nonsense about the attic from her family when she was growing up, that she found herself on edge even thinking about climbing the stairway that led up to it. She only went up last time because Alice had requested it and she often found the swaying figure she had seen in the cobweb-covered full-length mirror, haunting her dreams. Alice had said it was probably her best friend, Amy, checking up on her and she shouldn’t be frightened, but Jess was still reluctant to find out whether the figure had been a trick of the light, or a message from beyond.
‘I know, Nana, I’m just a wuss,’ she said aloud.
She decided to build up to it in stages, and walked slowly up to the first-floor landing where she made her way to the window at the front of the house and looked out over the lane. Taking several deep breaths, she was just about to turn to embark on stage two of her mission, when a battered old car with a late-nineties number plate pulled up on the drive. Two men in their early thirties, wearing badly fitting suits, got out of the car and walked quickly to the front door. Jess, relieved at having the trip to the attic postponed, stepped briskly down the stairs.
She opened the door to find one of the men standing on the top step, the other stood at the bottom, looking nervously up and down the lane.
‘Hello, love,’ the man on the top step said, slipping his foot into the gap between the door and the frame.
The Legacy: Trouble Comes Disguised As Family (Unspoken Book 2) Page 19