by Maggie Hope
‘He is, lass,’ said Frank. ‘And out of his mind wondering what happened to you. Where the hell have you been, any road? There’s been no word from you in all these months, you never even told us you’d changed your job.’
Molly heard what he said, the words were there in her head, but for a second or two she was incapable of understanding anything but the first three. It was true, Jackson was alive, it wasn’t some cruel trick the Sunday Sun had played on her. It wasn’t some other Jackson Morley, it was hers.
‘Where is he?’ she whispered as Frank fell silent.
‘A place out Sunderland way. A convalescent place.’
‘He’s hurt?’
‘He was. Getting better now, though. He’ll be back with his unit soon.’
Frank had instinctively answered her questions as tersely as they were given. Molly sat down again for she had risen to her feet when she had thought Jackson was hurt.
‘You never even wrote, lass,’ said Maggie reproachfully. But she was affected by Molly’s obvious agitation, as was Frank.
‘Put the kettle on, Maggie, make the lass a cup of tea,’ he said now. ‘She looks as though she could do with it.’ She did an’ all, he thought. By heck, she must love their Jackson all right. Well, mebbe this time there would be a happy ending to it. They deserved one, that was for sure.
‘Near Sunderland?’
Molly looked as though she was ready to go there now, this minute. She sat on the edge of her chair, looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. Her clock it was, she thought suddenly. The clock that had come from her dad’s house, the marble clock, still ticking away. Beside it stood a wooden clock from around 1930 that had stopped.
Maggie saw her glance. ‘You don’t mind, do you? But ours stopped and yours was upstairs doing nothing, so I thought …’
‘No, of course I don’t mind,’ said Molly. She looked at Maggie, really looked at her for the first time since she had entered the house. Jackson’s mother looked well, better than she had done for ages. The dullness had left her eyes, the corners of her mouth turned up as though she was ready to smile at any minute and there was a healthy colour in her cheeks. Very different from the last time Molly had seen her, when they had both thought Jackson was lost.
Maggie lifted the kettle and felt its weight before settling it on the fire. Then she began bustling about from the pantry to the kitchen table, laying a cloth and bringing out the best cups from the press.
‘I’ll help you,’ said Molly, moving to do so.
‘No, I can manage,’ said Maggie. Then, realising she must sound short, she paused and smiled at Molly. ‘Look, like I said, we’ll forget the past, will we? I know I likely said things I shouldn’t but I was near out of my mind about the lad. You an’ all, I shouldn’t wonder. I just didn’t have room in me to consider how you were feeling.’
‘It’s all right, I know.’
‘An’ if I should have had suspicions I shouldn’t, I’m sorry about that too,’ Maggie went on.
‘What the heck are you on about, woman?’ Frank demanded.
‘Nothing, it was nothing. I’m sure I took no notice,’ said Molly hastily.
How could she say it like that? she asked herself. How could she take a forgiving tone when Maggie had been right all along and it was she herself who was in the wrong? By, she was a right bad ’un, she knew that. But she would tell Maggie the truth, she would really, after she had had a chance to explain to Jackson. If he forgave Molly, his mother would. But it was a blooming big if, indeed it was.
Suddenly the need to see him for herself, even if it meant he couldn’t bear the sight of her after what she had done, was paramount, an all-consuming desire.
‘How far away is it? The convalescent home, I mean?’ Perhaps she had time to go there and see him tonight.
Maggie looked up from setting out a raspberry sponge filled with jam from the canes that grew wild on the old disused railway embankment. She saw at once by her expression what Molly had in mind.
‘Eeh, you can’t go there tonight, man, it’s thirty miles or more. You have to get a bus to Sunderland from Bishop and another out to the place. No, don’t be so daft. There’s time for you, he’ll likely be there a while yet. It’s two or three weeks before he goes back to his unit.’
Molly’s eyes dimmed. ‘You’ll give me the address, though?’
‘Oh, aye.’
‘We have some letters here from your Harry,’ said Frank. ‘Maggie, fetch them out for the lass.’
Molly looked at the writing on the envelopes. There were two of them, one written weeks ago and one just the previous week. ‘I’ll read them on the bus home,’ she said, and stuffed them into her bag feeling guilty once again. She should have told Harry, she knew that. After all he was her only kin.
In spite of all her feelings of guilt and worry and foreboding for the future, Molly enjoyed the couple of hours with the Morleys before she left to catch the bus back to Ferryhill. For whatever her troubled thoughts there was one big underlying truth which shone in her mind. Jackson was alive. He was even in the county. He had been hurt but he was better or at least recovering. And he still loved her. He had come looking for her, hadn’t he? Surely he would still want her, no matter what she had done? She would forgive him anything, anything at all, of course she would, because her love was big enough for it. And his too, she told herself. His too.
Chapter Twenty-nine
‘WAS HE THERE then?’ asked Dora when Molly arrived back in Ferryhill that Sunday evening. Dora looked agitated even though she was sitting in a chair knitting away furiously. She didn’t lift her eyes from the work.
‘No. He’s in a convalescent home up Sunderland way,’ Molly answered. ‘But, oh, Dora, isn’t it marvellous? He’s alive!’
‘Marvellous,’ she agreed. Her knitting needles clicked busily on to the end of the row. She changed the needles round and straightened out the tiny garment she was making before relaxing her hands into her lap and looking hard at Molly.
‘He might not want you back, you know, not with the bairn.’
The light died from Molly’s eyes. Oh, she didn’t need Dora to tell her that. She was unbuttoning her coat but now slumped down on a chair without taking it off.
‘I know.’
Dora resumed her knitting, making the steel needles click hard like a tattoo. ‘Not many men will accept another man’s baby.’ She nodded her head to emphasise her words.
‘Dora, I know that, don’t go on about it.’
‘Aye, an’ if he does, what then?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What about me? What do you think I mean? After I stuck by you, gave you a home, looked after Beth like she was my own?’
Molly gazed at her. Dora’s face was red, she had obviously been crying. As she knitted, her lips worked continuously.
‘I love Beth like she was me own an’ all,’ she burst out angrily before she stopped knitting abruptly and rolled the garment up, stabbing the ball of wool viciously on the end of the needles.
‘I’ll put the kettle on. We’ll have our cocoa. You have work the morrow.’
‘I’m on nights,’ Molly reminded her gently. She didn’t know how to deal with Dora’s pain and fear. Surely the woman must have known that Molly and the baby might move away one day? After all, Beth was her baby, not Dora’s.
‘I’d like to go to see him one day this week. I could go during the day …’
‘Best go tomorrow,’ said Dora. She was mixing cocoa and sugar with dried milk; half a pint of fresh milk a day didn’t allow for such luxuries as cocoa. ‘You want to go tomorrow, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then, I take it you don’t want to take Beth?’
‘No. Not this time at any rate.’ Molly looked at her. ‘Look, I’m sorry, really I am. But I don’t know what’s going to happen, do I? Or even if anything is. In any case you would still be able to see Beth, of course you would. I’ll always be grateful to you, Dora.’
She tried to put out of her mind all the times when she had not been grateful, those occasions when Dora seemed to be taking over Beth.
‘There she is now, I’ll go,’ said Dora, and it was only after she’d said it that Molly could hear the baby whimpering. Either Dora had especially acute hearing or she was so attuned to the baby that she heard her almost before she started to cry. She rushed upstairs and Molly could hear her crooning softly, the baby’s cries stilled. Sometimes Molly thought Dora was trying to put Beth in Mona’s place. But perhaps she was reading too much into it.
Next morning Molly caught the eight-thirty bus to Durham and a connecting one to Sunderland. Her first glimpse of the town shocked her and she was surprised at the amount of bomb damage. There were great holes in some of the streets, single walls still standing even to third- and fourth-floor level. It was raining and water stood in exposed cellars; wind blew at a pair of green curtains hanging at a third-floor window with all the glass blown out.
A twinge of anxiety went through Molly. Surely the soldiers’ convalescent home wasn’t near this place where there was so much danger from air raids? She rummaged in her bag for the address: Barton Lodge, Washington Road. There was a post office nearby and Molly went in and asked for directions.
‘Why do you want to know?’ the postmaster asked with suspicion. ‘How do I know you’re not a spy?’
‘My boyfriend is there. Do you want to see my identity card?’ She wasn’t a bit affronted, it was good that people were suspicious.
‘Number 23 bus will drop you at the gates,’ the postmaster said after looking at her identity card. Molly thanked him and hurried back to the bus stop. Her feelings were so mixed up by now, elated anticipation uppermost one minute then dread at what Jackson would say the next, that her stomach was churning. No matter what, though, she told herself, she had to see him, touch him. If he rejected her after that she would die; she couldn’t bear to think of what she would do if his reaction was contempt.
‘I would like to see Sergeant Morley,’ she said to the young girl in mobcap and apron who opened the door.
‘Who?’ asked the girl, and Molly could have screamed at her. But instead she said again.
‘Sergeant Morley. Jackson Morley?’
‘You’ll have to ask Matron.’
The girl pointed to a door at the side of the hall and Molly walked over to it and knocked.
‘This is not visiting time,’ said a thickset woman with hairs on her chin and an incongruous lace-edged cap tied under her chin with a large bow.
‘I know, I’m sorry. But I have to work tonight. I’m on night shift at the munitions factory.’
‘Well, all right. Sergeant Morley is in the garden. The girl will show you where. He is expecting to be discharged today, after the doctor’s rounds. Now they’re at twelve o’clock sharp so you haven’t got long.’
The clock on the wall stood at half-past eleven. Molly went with the maid around the corner of the house to where there were long lawns running down to a stream. There were only one or two soldiers visible, one sitting on a bench in the shelter of a wall, another walking along by the stream. His head was bent, shoulders hunched. He stared at the brown, peaty water bubbling along over the stones as he walked.
‘Jackson!’
Molly took one look at him and all her doubts, all her misgivings, were forgotten as she ran down the slope to him. He lifted his head, gazing at her, opening his arms as she ran into them, holding her close. Her arms were round his neck, her face buried in his shoulder. She could feel the beat of his heart through his tunic, only a little slower than the fast wild beat of her own.
‘Molly … Molly,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Oh my God, I was beginning to think I would never find you again.’
Tears were dropping from her eyes unheeded. She lifted her face and he kissed each eyelid, her cheeks, her chin, and at last her lips. A deep, satisfying kiss which yet conveyed all the loneliness of the last months, years even. He took out a handkerchief and wiped her face gently, gazed down into the deep brown pools of her eyes. She clung to him, never wanted to let go, could not even if she had wanted to.
‘Jackson …’
‘Whisht, my love, hush. Don’t talk, not now.’
Holding her close against him with one arm, he began walking her to the edge of the garden, a secluded corner where a large laurel bush screened them from any prying eyes that might be looking from the windows of the home. There he took her in his arms again, stroked her hair and held her against the lean, hard length of him. She lifted a hand against his brown cheek, twisted a lock of dark hair in her fingers, felt faint with love of him. She pressed closer to him, her breasts tingling, the tips hardening; felt the answering hardness of him against her belly.
‘I want you,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘I want you now!’
‘Sergeant Morley? Sergeant, where are you? The doctor is here, come in at once!’
They didn’t hear it at first until the soldier who had been sitting on the bench by the wall, and had watched with interest as they took cover behind the laurel bush, added his voice to that of the nurse.
‘Jack? Put her down and come out of there, you’re wanted,’ he called. ‘Can’t you hear the nurse?’
Jackson sighed, loosed his arms from Molly, though retaining her hand in his, and kissed her on the tip of her nose. ‘Wait for me,’ he said softly. ‘I won’t be long.’
As he walked back to the house, the soldier on the bench grinned at him. ‘Lucky devil,’ he said. ‘How did you manage to get a girl like that?’
‘Never you mind, Don,’ Jackson replied. ‘You find one of your own.’
They went to a hotel overlooking the beach at Roker for the need to hold each other, to touch and make love, was overwhelming. Molly hung back a little, sure the bored-looking woman behind the desk would guess they weren’t married and tell them to go. But she didn’t, merely reached behind her for the key to the room. She had lots of soldiers coming in with their girls or wives, she didn’t care which.
‘After all, there’s a war on, the poor lads have to go somewhere,’ she said to her husband as she went through into the office. ‘And any road, we need the money.’
‘I’m not saying nowt, am I?’ he asked.
The room was fairly basic but clean, and in any case they weren’t really interested in their surroundings. They undressed each other, carefully at first then with increasing haste, pulling off the inhibiting clothes, dropping them on the floor where they lay unheeded. Her arms were around his neck, her mouth on his. He lifted her up and she wound her legs around him and they fell on the bed, both lost in an ecstasy of pounding blood and rising excitement until Molly at least thought she would die of it. And when release came it was in such a crescendo of feeling that both of them cried aloud and collapsed in each other’s arms. And a few minutes later it all started again.
It was Molly who woke first from a deep contented sleep. Her head was resting in the crook of his shoulder, his arm across her breasts. She felt herself deeply wrapped in his love, so bewitched that all her worries were as nothing compared to it. This was the real world, this was what mattered, nothing else in the whole world.
Jackson stirred, opened his eyes and smiled at her. His smile was perfect, eyes shining into hers so that she smiled back adoringly.
‘We could stay here tonight,’ he said softly. ‘We’ll stay in this bed until tomorrow. If we’re hungry later I’ll order a meal sent up. Will I do that?’
‘Yes. Oh, yes,’ she breathed into his ear, took the lobe between her teeth, nibbled gently at it. But then an image of Beth rose before her eyes, intruding on her Eden.
‘No,’ she said, moving away from him so that he protested and held on to her arm, trying to stop her. ‘I have to get back, it’s important.’
‘Stay,’ he insisted. ‘What could be more important than this?’
It’s not a what, it’s a who, thought Molly. She tried to say it aloud, now, when it was a good ti
me to say it, but she couldn’t, not when they were so happy.
‘I have to go to work,’ she said lamely.
‘Take a shift off,’ said Jackson. ‘Surely at a time like this you’re entitled to a night off? Oh, come on, my love, stay with me.’
‘I can’t. I have to go,’ Molly said, a catch in her voice. Oh, God help me, she thought, what am I going to do?
Jackson took his arm away, sat up in the bed. ‘Then if you have to go, I’m coming with you.’ He swung his legs out of bed, stood and went to the window. She watched him, loving his long, lithe body, the powerful shoulders, and the line of his hair on the strong column of his neck. Then his words echoed in her mind, she realised what he had said and sat bolt upright.
‘No!’
He turned, raised an eyebrow in surprise. ‘Why not? I have to know where you’re living, I don’t intend losing you again.’ He strode to the bed, took her in his arms. ‘Not ever again, do you hear me?’
Molly leaned her head into the curve of his shoulder and closed her eyes. She felt drunk with the proximity of him. It became harder and harder to think, but she had to.
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘It’s just that I’m living with a widow and she doesn’t like men callers,’ Molly said lamely, and Jackson put back his head and shouted with laughter.
‘She doesn’t like men callers! Which century is she living in? Is this the twentieth or not?’
Molly pulled away from him and got out of bed. She began picking up her clothes from the floor where they had been discarded in the urgency of their need. She went to the wash basin which stood in a corner of the room, ran water and began washing herself.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Jackson, watching her. He pulled on his underpants and uniform trousers, looked around for his shirt.
‘Nothing. At least … I can’t go back there now, I’ll have to go straight to work or I’ll be late.’