By this last act her standing as a respected businesswoman took a huge leap forward, and opening a further two shops within the next three years confirmed her position in the town. She made no effort to buy property over the river in Monkwearmouth or Southwick, however, no matter how attractive the price. Nor did she venture that way on the Sunday jaunts that she and Daisy and the others frequently enjoyed. It was enemy territory.
Lucy shivered. Every so often, without fail, Tom Crawford would make sure she was aware of his brooding presence on the perimeter of her life. Occasionally she actually caught a glimpse of him, but more often than not she was simply aware of being watched by invisible eyes. It played on her nerves, especially after he became a town councillor and was accepted into the upper strata of Sunderland society.
Of Jacob she had seen and heard nothing. Jacob could be on the other side of the world rather than the other side of the River Wear.
She knew the family blamed her inability to relax and her insomnia on overwork. All, that is, except Ruby. Only Ruby knew what ailed her, and the reason for the rule that Daisy never left the house unchaperoned. The problem was Tom Crawford and, while he drew breath, tension and anxiety would always be constant companions. It didn’t help that as Daisy had grown, so had certain traits become apparent that could be linked to the man who’d sired her. Not in a physical sense. In looks, Daisy was a carbon copy of her, Lucy thought thankfully, but from a toddler her daughter had displayed an iron-like will that was disconcerting in one so young and especially a girl. There was no spirit of compromise in Daisy, either, no inclination to meet an adversary halfway to avoid confrontation. When her daughter had made up her mind about a matter, she became blind and deaf to reason.
But – Lucy’s eyes softened – Daisy was also kind and compassionate, which helped to balance that other side. From a toddler she’d hero-worshipped Charley, following him around whenever she could, and although the two of them fought like cat and dog on occasion, Lucy knew they were close. And she herself had a special bond with her daughter, even though they had many a battle over this or that. Another of Daisy’s endearing qualities was that she was incapable of remaining cross for long or of holding a grudge, and in spite of her daughter’s complicated nature, which seemed to cause the child to war against herself as much as anyone else, theirs was a deeply loving relationship.
She stretched and stood up, glancing round her sitting room, where the French windows were open to the warm twilight of the August evening. It was a beautiful room; she had furnished it herself exactly how she wanted it – she was lucky, so lucky, to have all this, and most of the family working in the business. The East End property was run by a husband-and-wife team and their two grownup daughters who lived in the flat over the shop, but the other shops were managed by Ruby and John. Ruby was in charge of the one off High Street West, and Flora and Bess helped her along with another assistant, and John was responsible for the remaining two properties and had a staff of seven employees answering to him. Matthew had left school the previous year and had joined Lucy to learn about the supply and delivery side of the business, which was now extremely lucrative, as her bank balance testified. Her requirements had long since overtaken what Seamus could provide; she now had several sources of supply and a fleet of three vans. She still drove one herself because she enjoyed it, but once Matthew was old enough to pass his driving test he would take her place and be in charge of the other van drivers. At least that had been the plan, before talk of this wretched war. She’d imagined that within a few years she would be able to leave the business in the hands of the family and take Daisy to Europe, away at last from the reach of Tom Crawford. The private nest egg she’d accumulated would have meant they could have travelled and broadened their minds, before settling somewhere and making a new life in the country of Daisy’s choice. Free from the past.
She walked out into the quiet garden, needing its serenity. The evening was soft, the air filled with the scent of roses and fragrant mignonette and jasmine. The birds were singing and the eight-foot-high walls covered in ivy and climbing roses represented safety. She glanced at the beds of sweet peas, larkspurs, pinks and all manner of sweetly perfumed flowers, but tonight the garden didn’t work its magic. Her eyes focused on the sections of the air-raid shelter they’d been provided with, which were currently placed against the wall of the house. The lads had wanted to erect the steel-built, tunnel-shaped shelter weeks ago, but it needed to be partly sunk into the ground and would have meant destroying some of the garden. She’d told them that if – if – war was announced, they could do their worst, but not before.
She’d been fooling herself. It had been clear from the beginning of the year, when the government had begun to distribute air-raid shelters and had announced that the Territorial Army was to be doubled, what was in store. The country was bracing itself, and talk of plans to introduce conscription and of farmers ploughing up grazing pastures to increase the proportion of food produced at home was just the beginning. Only this month it had been announced that everyone was to have an identity card and number, and many movable treasures had been taken to safety from the major museums and galleries and even from Westminster Abbey. The Polish crisis was deepening, and folk were saying that by the end of the month the Army and RAF reserves would be called up and the Royal Navy mobilized. John was already declaring that he wanted to teach the dirty Nazis a lesson, and when she’d chastised him for such talk, he’d told her flatly that he wouldn’t wait to be called up before he did his bit.
Lucy bit down hard on her lip, her stomach churning. Such talk terrified her. John was nineteen years old and he hadn’t got an aggressive bone in his body. He had no idea what he’d be letting himself in for. He spoke as though it was an exciting game. Just last Sunday he and Matthew had disappeared for hours and come home full of watching a practice of the gas decontamination unit in operation. But war wasn’t a game; it was vile, savage, barbaric.
Her dark thoughts were broken by voices calling her name. The others had gone to the cinema, the Ritz in Holmeside, which had only been open a couple of years and had been fitted out lavishly with chandeliers and deep-pile carpets. She’d pleaded a headache to avoid going, but really she had wanted to go over some accounts in peace and quiet and, she admitted to herself, when she wasn’t at work she preferred to be within the security of her own four walls.
They came surging through the French doors into the garden, crowding around her and laughing and chattering as they described the Astaire and Rogers musical, interrupting each other constantly. Ruby and John’s voices rose above the others as they disagreed over something. Lucy smiled ruefully. She’d never imagined she would find her brother’s and sister’s bickering comforting, but just at the moment the normality of it was balm to her soul.
Just over a week later, on Sunday September 3rd, at eleven-fifteen in the morning, the eight of them were clustered together again, but this time there was no laughter as they sat listening to the radio broadcast by the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.
‘I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room of 10 Downing Street. This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that unless we had heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this nation is at war with Germany.’
Lucy’s face was chalk-white, her heart thudding so hard it was painful, but as she glanced at the others, no one spoke and even John was motionless. And then the sound of the air-raid sirens outside shattered the stillness and sent everyone diving under the kitchen table, amid shrieks and frightened squeals from Daisy, Flora and Bess.
It was only after the noise had dwindled away a little while later, the expected aerial onslaught being unforthcoming, that Lucy said flatly, ‘I think you lads had better get started on the air-raid shelter this afternoo
n.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
‘But I don’t understand, lad. They’ll call you up soon enough, you can rest assured on that. Why go and willingly stick your head in the noose?’
Jacob smiled at Dolly. She’d said she didn’t understand his decision, but the truth of it was he couldn’t explain what he didn’t fully understand himself. He was no hero, and he wasn’t even sure if he was doing it for King and country. He just knew that the last nine years or so had been different from what he’d expected. Before he had seen Lucy again, after her husband had been murdered, he’d begun to settle into a life without her. Afterwards, well, he’d gone mad for a while, he thought ruefully. Wine, women and song. He knew Abe and Dolly had been worried to death. Then one morning he’d woken up to find yet another pool of vomit by the bed and had staggered to the mirror to look at his bleary-eyed face. He’d stared for a long time at a reflection he barely recognized, remembering nothing of the night before, but some woman’s cheap perfume was rank on his clothes and he hadn’t a penny left in his pockets.
From that day to this he hadn’t touched a drop of liquor, and he’d started courting the nice lass he’d taken up with before he’d seen Lucy again. It hadn’t lasted – Felicity had told him one day, when they’d been walking out for a year or more, that she felt she couldn’t compete with the perfect memory he held of his childhood sweetheart, and he hadn’t disabused her that his memory of Lucy was far from perfect now. Which had said a lot about how he felt about Felicity, in hindsight.
And so he had taken to working longer and longer hours in the forge, burning off his dissatisfaction and sense of loss, and not least his sexual frustration, with physical hard work. And it had helped, to some extent.
There had been the odd occasion when he’d longed to go out and get drunk, usually after a family get-together at Christmas or New Year, which he showed up at to please his mother, who was forever complaining she didn’t see him from one year to the next. At those times when Tom was present, his brother inevitably commented on Lucy’s meteoric rise within the community and deliberated on what she must be worth now, letting Jacob know that she was well out of his league. Tom needn’t have bothered, if he had but known. That one meeting with her had told him whatever she’d felt for him when they were youngsters was gone, and there was nothing so dead as the cold ashes of love.
Shaking away his thoughts, Jacob took Dolly’s plump little hand in his and looked into her worried face. He was closer to this little woman than he was to his own mother and over the years he’d come to love her dearly. And he knew Dolly thought the world of him. Growing up, he had always been aware that there was no one like Tom for their mam and, child-like, he’d accepted it. Ralph and Frank hadn’t seemed to mind, but then the pair of them had always been thick with their da. He had been the odd one out somehow, but having Lucy, it hadn’t seemed to matter. It was only when he was lying in the hospital after Tom had told him Lucy had left that he fully realized that, in siphoning off the major part of her affection for Tom, his mam had done the rest of them down, including his da.
‘I have to do this, Dolly,’ he said softly now. He didn’t say, ‘I need to find myself because she wouldn’t have understood that. What he did say was, ‘But I want you to know something – something I should have said years ago. You’re the mam I always wanted, and I couldn’t have got through without knowing that you and Abe were behind me in the bad times. My mother is a good woman and she brought me into the world, but I’ve never thought of her as I think of you. I’m proud to be your son.’
‘Oh, lad.’ The tears were running down her rosy cheeks and she couldn’t say more, and when Jacob took her into his arms they stood together for some time with her face pressed against his shirt front.
The town was quieter than usual when Jacob walked into Bishopwearmouth later that day. Children were being evacuated to safe areas in the country and Sunderland’s exodus had begun the day before, on September 10th. Clutching their few personal possessions and gas masks, the little ones had gathered at specific times at the train stations, their weepy relatives waving them off. Few parents knew where their children would end up, although the government had said they’d be told as soon as possible. Jacob wondered if Lucy had sent her daughter away. The child must be nine years old now, old enough to have an opinion about whether she went or stayed. Several of their customers had related details of the rumpus caused at home when evacuation had been mentioned to the older children, and although some of them had won the battle to stay, it seemed that the little ones were packed off willy-nilly.
He walked through the warm dusty streets, feeling it could well be the calm before the storm. Everyone was on tenterhooks for the expected bombing to begin and some people he passed were carrying their gas masks. Air-raid shelters had grown up everywhere, he noticed: the Anderson shelter for those who had a garden and could dig some three feet down and then cover the corrugated-steel roof with earth, along with turf and flowers in some cases; and a brick-surface shelter where households only had a back yard. For those folk without even their own back yard there was the Morrison shelter. He had been in a friend’s house recently that had one, and the oblong box, which served well as a table, had proved to be a great den for the children. He’d peeped inside after hearing giggles when he was sitting having a cup of tea, and found four cheeky little faces grinning at him. The children had been snuggled up among the cushions and blankets that the shelter contained, reading picture books by torchlight. Their harassed mother, who’d recently given birth to twin boys, had remarked that it kept the older ones occupied for hours, and every cloud – even the war – had a silver lining.
The afternoon was a mellow one. The sky was high and blue and the air warm, but without the fierce heat of July or August. A breeze caressed his face as he walked and he stopped, taking his cap off for a moment and running his fingers through his curly brown hair. On such a quintessential English day it seemed impossible that across the ocean Warsaw, a town of ordinary men and women and children like the ones here, was enduring days of nightmarish bombing, which was devastating the city and killing tens of thousands. At the end of August the news reports had spoken of France and Britain’s confidence that, if the worst happened, the Poles would hold Nazi Germany in the east and the superior strength of the old First World War Allies would produce a victory. Now even the most optimistic could see that Poland was doomed. And it could happen here. They had underestimated Hitler.
He shivered, but the chill was from within. Which was why he had to see Lucy one last time before he enlisted. It wasn’t rational, and when he had told Dolly she had been horrified, reminding him of the downward spiral their last meeting had provoked, but he couldn’t leave without saying goodbye. That was all he wanted to do. He expected nothing, he would ask for nothing. But he had to see her. If she wasn’t in, if she was away, then he would delay enlisting until she was back, because once you’d signed up they had you off to training camp quicker than a dose of salts, from what he’d heard.
He knew where she lived. Well, the address at least, he corrected himself. He’d never been there. But the houses round Barnes Park were a cut above. She’d done well for herself, but then Lucy had always been top of the class at school and had left the rest of them standing. He remembered the hours she had spent going over fractions and decimals with him, when the intricacies of arithmetic had been beyond him and Mr Gilbert had made him wear the dunce’s cap three days running. In front of the other bairns in the playground he’d acted big and challenged any of the lads who’d needled him about it to a fight, saying real men didn’t need learning and it was a load of rubbish. Inside he’d been dying. When they were alone, Lucy had put her arms round him and he’d cried like a baby, and even then, at the age of nine or ten, he’d wondered why it cost him nothing in pride to admit the truth to her.
He stopped abruptly. What was he doing? Dolly was right, he was indulging in some form of masochism in trying to see Lucy again.
He closed his eyes as he raised his face for a moment, letting the sun glow red behind his eyelids. What cruel quirk of human nature allowed people to go on loving when they weren’t loved in return? There should be some sort of safety mechanism built into every human heart that could turn off the flow when required. He should turn round right now and make his way back over the river. It was the sensible thing to do.
But when had sense ever come into the feelings that he had for Lucy? A grim smile touching his lips, he walked briskly on.
The trees in Barnes Park and the surrounding streets were in the last flush of summer, green and lush before the first autumnal frosts set about changing their raiment to gold and red and brown. This western suburb of Bishopwearmouth was leafy and quiet and an air of restrained, good-mannered prosperity prevailed. Jacob stood looking towards the front garden of the house he knew to be Lucy’s and was struck by how just a few furlongs could change an area. The neat square of lawn was surrounded by small orderly shrubs, and a path at the side led to the front door, which had stained glass in the top section. The three-storey terraced house was shipshape and smart from the outside, as were its neighbours, and it struck him afresh just how much she’d risen in the world.
Dancing in the Moonlight Page 24