by Maureen Lee
He was tempted to go as he was, in his working clothes, smelling of God knows what had been in the crates and sacks he’d spent the day carrying off the ship. But a sense of pride made him change into a clean shirt and his second-best suit. He contemplated not wearing a collar and tie, but once again pride forced him into searching for his collar studs and picking out a tie – he only had two.
Ready! Now, which way should he go? It was still light outside, and tongues would wag if he was seen entering Jessie’s house by the front door, all done up, like. Aggie Donovan’s tongue would wag the most, and if Sheila discovered where he’d been, he would be subjected to the third degree, pinned against the wall while she shone a torch into his face and demanded to know what was going on. He would have to go down Amethyst Street, turn into Coral Street and go in Jessie’s by the back way.
He looked at his reflection in the wardrobe mirror, bowed at himself from the waist and set off.
‘Ah, there you are,’ she said. She smoothed the lapels of his jacket by way of greeting and kissed him briefly on the cheek. She was wearing a long blue velvet garment; he wasn’t sure if it was a dressing gown or an evening dress. It wasn’t the sort of thing that Pearl Street women were usually seen wearing. He could smell the scent she’d used, which was subtler and softer than the stuff the other women he knew dabbed behind their ears. Straight away, instantly, he wanted to bury his face in her red hair. ‘How have you been, Jack?’
‘Very well,’ he replied; his voice had just a touch of a croak in it. ‘Very well indeed. Where’s Penny?’
‘Upstairs, fast asleep.’ She smiled and said conversationally, ‘I’m glad your Sean is so much better; almost completely, Eileen said. She told me before what a state he was in before. Almost like a coma.’
‘Almost like a coma, yes, you’re right. But he’s much better. Wants to go back in the RAF, but they wouldn’t take him in a million years.’
‘You’re right. He needs to be set up in his own business.’
At her words, Jack recovered himself just a little. ‘His own business? Oh, that’s a fine idea. I’ll set one up for him tomorrer.’
Jess smiled. ‘Good old Jack, as prickly as ever. Why don’t you sit down and have something to drink?’ She pointed to the easy chairs close together in front of the fire and he sat on the nearest. The room was fully furnished, and he wondered if it was Miss Brazier’s furniture that she’d left behind when she went off and joined the army.
‘I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea.’ There hadn’t been time to make a pot at home while he’d been beautifying himself for her.
‘I meant a real drink. There’s everything imaginable available at the base. What would you like? I’ve brought whisky, rum, gin, a couple of liqueurs. I even have half a dozen cans of beer.’
‘Huh! It doesn’t look as if your lot are suffering shortages like us on this side of the Atlantic,’ he growled.
‘They aren’t. They brought loads of stuff over with them. And I don’t know what you mean by “your lot”, Jack. I married an American, but I didn’t change my nationality.’
‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll have a whisky, then, neat.’ It was his nature to pick a fight with anyone who appeared to be overprivileged. He’d had no end of battles with Jess’s dad, the tight bastard, in the days when he’d lived in Pearl Street. ‘Anyroad, what was it you wanted to see me about?’
She selected the whisky from the row of bottles on the sideboard, poured him a glass, then sat in the other chair. He was aware that her face had suddenly flushed. She was embarrassed about something. ‘You’ve always known that Penny is your child, haven’t you, Jack?’
It was his turn to flush. ‘Yes.’
‘Arthur must have had something wrong with him. We were married for almost twenty years, but I never became pregnant, although I’d always longed for children.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘There was just that one time with you – and nine months later I had Penny.’
Jack hung his head, embarrassed himself, and didn’t speak.
‘I became pregnant a second time. That was yours too, but I lost it.’
He hadn’t known that and he was shocked. ‘Lost it?’
‘I had a miscarriage, a sort of accident.’ She moved her legs so that her knees touched his, and he wondered if she’d placed the chairs close together deliberately. ‘Ever since, I’ve never stopped wanting another baby, Jack.’
‘Aren’t you getting a bit past it?’ he said coarsely. ‘And correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t you been married to your Yankee officer for the past two years? Is he another one like Arthur?’
‘Gus is a widower; he has a son from his first marriage. No, there’s nothing wrong with him, I just haven’t been lucky enough to conceive, that’s all. Now he’s been posted to Europe; he only left the other day. I’ve no idea when I’ll see him again.’
‘What’s that got to do with me?’ Why on earth were they having this conversation? He reminded himself that it was Jess who’d introduced the subject of babies and how they were acquired.
‘Can’t you guess?’ she said softly.
It took Jack a minute or so, and when he understood what she meant, his body went cold from head to toe in a way it had never done before. He stared at her with horror. ‘You want me to … ?’ He couldn’t think of a polite word for it on the spur of the moment.
‘Yes.’ She fell to her knees and laid her head in his lap. ‘Please, Jack.’
Jack couldn’t have described the emotions that ran like wildfire through his body right then, but he went from being very cold to very hot. He couldn’t help himself. He slipped out of the chair so that they were kneeling together on the mat in front of the fire and buried his face in her beautiful hair. ‘I love you, Jess,’ he whispered.
‘And I love you, Jack. I always have and I always will.’
He laid her down so that she was on the floor beneath him. The dressing gown thing fell open, exposing her white body and her luscious breasts. He kissed them greedily, then thrust his big hand between her legs …
Afterwards, they lay on the floor, exhausted, though Jack wasn’t the sort of chap who could lie about naked in someone else’s house and he had pulled his trousers back on. He wondered what had happened to Jess’s blue garment as he stroked the curve of her hips and felt the softness of her breasts.
If she loved him as much as she said, why weren’t they living together in the house in Garnet Street, where they could lie together like this whenever they liked – which as far as he was concerned would be every single night?
He didn’t bother asking the question; he already knew what the answer would be, not that she’d spell it out in detail. He, a mere docker, living just round the corner from the house where she’d been born, wasn’t nearly good enough or important enough for her. She was only prepared to take up with a professional man like Arthur, her first husband, who’d gone to university and had a degree in something or other, or the Yankee officer she was hooked up with now.
He grinned, and she said immediately, ‘What are you smiling at?’
‘I was thinking how I’m nothing but a bloody racehorse,’ he said. ‘A stud.’
‘You should charge a fee,’ she suggested, smiling back. ‘It would have to be guineas, not pounds.’
A thought struck him. She wouldn’t want the Yank knowing she’d been having it off with another man. If Jack was going to give her the baby she wanted, it’d have to be soon, within the next few weeks. It meant he’d have to get a move on. In fact, he felt up to it again right now.
He could do things to Jess, and she to him, that he’d never dreamt of doing with Mollie. He bent down and kissed her right breast, and she responded by arching her back and clasping his head in her hands. ‘Don’t stop, Jack,’ she said hoarsely. ‘Don’t stop.’
In the King’s Arms, quite a few of the customers were keeping an eye out for Jack Doyle. He hadn’t felt well the night before, had actually gone home early, they recalle
d, and they were worried that he’d come down with something.
When it reached nine o’clock, Mack suggested that someone go and knock on his door, make sure he was all right.
The someone returned five minutes later and said there’d been no answer to his knock, ‘I didn’t like to go inside. Anyroad, if there’s summat wrong with him, then his kids’d know and we’d have heard.’
Mack nodded. ‘I reckon you’re right. It seems that for once, Jack’s got something more important to do tonight than prop up the bar.’
It was October; Christmas was approaching. Would this be the last Christmas of the war? Everyone had wished for the same thing every Christmas since it had begun. Every time they had been wrong.
In the days before the war – it felt like an eternity ago – they’d made the cake and the puddings well in advance of Christmas, given them time to mature, like fine wine or posh cheese. But now it was a struggle to get most of the ingredients. Dried fruit was desperately hard to come by, eggs virtually impossible unless you were a child; margarine was needed for every day, not for an entire week’s ration to be used in a cake, even if it was for Christmas. Candied peel, glacé cherries and almonds were but a distant memory, as well as nutmeg, unless you still had a bit left to grate from before the war.
Despite these handicaps, the women with children were determined that Christmas Day would turn out to be just fine. Half a dozen or so of them might well get together and make the cakes and puddings between them, each contributing something until most of the ingredients were available. Decorations, years old, would be brought down from lofts or up from cellars and used over and over again. Fathers and grandfathers would be called upon to make go-carts and scooters, though obtaining wheels proved a problem.
Sheila Reilly was desperate to find a skate – the sort with four wheels that you stood on, not the fish. The family already had one, and she would have loved the lads to have a pair between them. She had put a card in the window of the post office before now, but nothing had come of it.
Brenda Mahon was at her busiest, having had orders for dozens of bobble hats and scarf and glove sets. Customers had to provide their own wool, which was rationed and could only be obtained by using precious clothing coupons – or by undoing another knitted garment that had lost its shape.
The weather didn’t help the national mood of mild dejection. The summer hadn’t exactly been glorious, and the autumn was foggy and damp, with the sun mainly invisible as it hid behind the droopy grey clouds that seemed to be permanently overhead. It had been forecast that the winter was destined to be a cold one.
In addition to the nagging worry that the war might never be over, that things could possibly get even worse as time passed and they would never eat a proper Christmas cake again, or manage to obtain a skate, Eileen and Sheila were deeply concerned that their dad appeared to be coming down with something.
‘He’s dead quiet all the time,’ Sheila complained to her sister. ‘Even if you deliberately say something to rile him, he doesn’t respond. I’ve encouraged him to see a doctor, but he says he doesn’t believe in them.’
‘Well, we’ve always known that,’ Eileen said worriedly. ‘It’s ages since he came to do the garden. Mind you, it’s not as if he’s miserable. No matter how quiet he is, he always seems to have a bit of a smile on his face.’
‘Do you think he’s up to something, sis?’
‘What on earth could he be up to that he wouldn’t tell us about?’
Sheila shook her head. ‘I can’t think of a single thing.’
Phyllis Taylor wasn’t enjoying being in the army nearly as much as she had expected. She was still missing her mum and dad, still feeling homesick, though it was two months since she had joined up.
And although Doria would always be her best friend, there were times when she wished she was best friends with someone else, someone who enjoyed sightseeing, say, who would like to go to museums and art galleries, theatres – though it would have to be the cheapest seats. (Some of these places might be closed due to the war, but it would be easy to find out.) Doria preferred dance halls and pubs crammed with servicemen, who would virtually leap upon them when they entered and insist on buying them drinks. Then Phyllis would have to confess she didn’t drink.
‘Just an orange juice,’ she would insist. At first she wondered why the man offering the drink would instantly go off her, until she realised it meant he was most unlikely to get her drunk and therefore willing to go outside with him for a ‘jolly good snog’, as Doria called them.
It was all rather unpleasant. Even if Phyllis could bring herself to ditch Doria as a friend, she would never do it, because she felt obliged to protect her. The day might come when Doria would get into serious trouble with one of the men interested in having more than a snog, and who would rescue her if Phyllis wasn’t around?
Phyllis and Doria were dancing in Trafalgar Square. It wasn’t an official dance; there wasn’t an orchestra, just three buskers – two with harmonicas and one with a banjo. The girls had been on their way to the Paramount Dance Hall in Tottenham Court Road on a brightly moonlit night, but had been distracted by the buskers and the couples – the men were American soldiers – who were jitterbugging like mad. It was the sort of occasion when women didn’t mind dancing with each other, and Doria and Phyllis were trying to jitterbug but making quite a hash of it, Phyllis in particular because she was in uniform, whereas Doria was wearing something frilly and high-heeled shoes.
Suddenly Doria was whisked away by a dashing young American and Phyllis was left on her own. She didn’t mind; she just backed into the watching crowds and, as so often happened, wondered what Mum and Dad were doing at this very minute in Beverley.
‘You don’t want to dance, do you?’ said a voice.
Phyllis turned. A young man in civvies was standing beside her. He was quite clear in the moonlight and looked very young, eighteen or nineteen at the most. He had a lovely cheerful face, a half-grown moustache, and wore a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles. ‘That’s a strange thing to ask,’ she said. ‘I suppose you’ll ask next if I don’t want anything to eat. Do you always ask negative questions?’
He didn’t look at all disconcerted. ‘Not usually,’ he said. ‘It’s just that when I saw that that American had taken over your friend, I felt I had to talk to you but thought you would prefer to dance, and I’m afraid I can’t dance a step.’
‘I’m not very good at it either.’
He grasped her elbow and they moved further back into the crowd. ‘Would you like a coffee? There’s a Lyons not far away. My name’s Martin Winters, by the way.’
‘I’m Phyllis Taylor.’ She would have loved a coffee with Martin Winters, but … ‘I’m sorry.’ she said. ‘I must wait for my friend. I can’t possibly desert her.’
‘I understand, but would it be possible for you to desert her at some time in the foreseeable future, like tomorrow, for instance, and we could go for a coffee then?’
Well, it should be possible, Phyllis thought. She and Doria weren’t Siamese twins. They didn’t have to go out together every single night. The American Doria was dancing with might ask her out and this time Phyllis would say she didn’t want to tag along like a gooseberry, or have the American bring along one of his pals for her – a blind date, it was called.
‘I could go for a coffee tomorrow,’ she told Martin Winters.
He raised his eyebrows and they disappeared behind the frame of his glasses. ‘Half past seven in Lyons?’ he suggested.
She said that would be fine, whereupon he smiled and demanded she tell him her entire life story in no more than a hundred words.
Phyllis laughed and said she wasn’t prepared to try, but would tell him in as many words as it took. She briefly described her upbringing in Beverley, adding that her mother was a nurse and her father a naval architect, but omitting the nonsense he’d got up to in Bootle. She told him what it was like living there and how much she’d loved it, then abo
ut joining the army as soon as she turned eighteen.
‘That was two months ago,’ she finished. ‘Now, what about you?’
‘Aged twenty-three,’ he said crisply. ‘Born in Coventry, no brothers and sisters, went to university, took French history. Wanted to fight for my country but turned down by army, navy and air force because my sight’s not up to scratch. Work now as reporter for the Daily Recorder; due there at ten o’clock, in fact – I’m on the night shift. Oh, and my dad was killed in an air raid. Me and Mum miss him very much.’
‘You poor thing,’ Phyllis cried. Holding her elbow had somehow turned into holding her hand. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘So’s me and Mum,’ he said with a heartfelt sigh.
‘I’m an only child too,’ she told him.
‘It’s quite nice sometimes, but not all the time,’ he remarked, giving her hand a squeeze.
‘And I’ve always been interested in French history. All those pompous kings and their mistresses – Madame de Pompadour …’
‘And Madame du Barry. And the Revolution; I mean, that was a revolution and a half. They really went to town with the guillotine.’ He shuddered.
‘And Napoleon. I admired him, but I know I shouldn’t because he wasn’t really a very nice person.’
‘Nor was Josephine,’ Martin said with a grin. ‘Do you know, since university, you’re the first person I’ve ever talked to like this.’
He squeezed her hand again and she squeezed his back. They looked at each other and Phyllis knew that something truly remarkable had happened that night. It was a bit scary in a way and she was frightened to put it into words or even think about it too hard.
‘I just knew, when I saw you,’ Martin stammered. ‘I just knew …’ His voice faded and he pulled Phyllis close and kissed her on the forehead. ‘I just knew something.’