by Jenny Holmes
‘Never. For a start, if I’d been married, I wouldn’t have run away.’
‘Not even from Gladys?’ he said. The mean jibe slipped out and he regretted it. ‘I’m sorry. She wasn’t always the way she is now.’
‘No; you made her like this by doing the dirty on her.’ Didn’t he see this? Was he totally clueless?
Cliff’s anger, lurking close to the surface, rose again. ‘There never was any baby,’ he said savagely, hitting the side of his fist against the trunk of a nearby tree. ‘She’s the liar here; not me!’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ She saw him now: hopeless, heartless, dishonest through and through. She turned back towards the bridge. ‘The baby is not the point. Anyway, I don’t believe you. I don’t know a woman in this world who would invent a baby just to get you to marry them.’
He laughed at her naivety. ‘Lucky you.’
‘Don’t laugh at me, Cliff Huby! You’re the one who’s made a bloody mess of things, not me.’
‘Yes, yes.’ He ran after her as she strode away. ‘And I’m sorry. I’ll put it right; I’ll get a divorce.’
She gasped incredulously and stopped. ‘A divorce?’
‘With a proper solicitor. I’ll find out how to do it.’
‘And then everything will be all right, will it?’ She went on again, with greater purpose in her stride because she wanted to put an end to this stupidity once and for all. ‘Don’t bother, Cliff. Not on my account.’
He watched her walk away. What more does she want, for Christ’s sake?
‘Don’t worry about giving me a lift home,’ she flung back over her shoulder as she crested the stone bridge and the water rushed under her feet. ‘I’ll stay at Brenda’s tonight.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Earlier that evening Brenda had collected the oil lamp from her billet and taken it down to the hall, so when she and Evelyn arrived at the goods wagon late on Saturday evening she had to light two candles that she set down on the washstand next to her bed. Then she gave Evelyn a blanket to wrap around her shoulders.
‘Well?’ she prompted when Evelyn sat down on the bed with an exhausted sigh.
‘I’ve had it out with him, told him what I think.’
‘Good.’
‘He said he’d get a divorce.’
Brenda knew this wasn’t the moment to be jumping in with an opinion. She sat down next to Evelyn and kept her thoughts to herself.
Tears began to flow. ‘Oh, Brenda – I’ve been buying linen for my bottom drawer for weeks. I bought a pattern for my wedding dress and I’ve almost finished saving up enough clothing coupons to buy the material. White brocade with a net underskirt.’
The candles flickered from a draught that crept in under the door. They cast long shadows across the poorly furnished room with its magazine pictures tacked to the walls and Brenda’s Land Girl uniform flung carelessly over the back of a chair. Outside in the yard Nancy the goat started to bray.
‘Oh, drat! Wait here while I see what that racket is about,’ Brenda told Evelyn.
She stepped outside to see Geoff and Giles saying goodbye to Bernard at the door of the farmhouse.
‘Dorothy is over the worst,’ Geoff told the old farmer as Brenda joined them. ‘Her pulse is still racing, but nothing like as bad as it was an hour ago.’
Bernard listened intently. He stood in shirtsleeves and slippers, stooping and grasping the edge of the door, blinking rapidly as he tried to take in what the vet was telling him.
‘Keep her in bed for the rest of the weekend. If you’re still worried about her tomorrow morning, don’t think twice about ringing Doc Brownlee. He’ll call the hospital and they’ll send an ambulance.’
‘Right you are.’ Noticing Brenda, Bernard ordered her to quieten the goat. ‘Be quick about it; we can’t hear ourselves think.’
Giles came with Brenda into the barn and together they gave Nancy an extra bundle of hay.
‘I bet you’re sorry you came tonight,’ she said as she hung the stuffed hay-net in the stall. ‘You didn’t get much chance to sweep us girls off our feet before it ended in calamity.’
‘It doesn’t matter to me. To be honest, I’m not the world’s best hoofer.’ His voice was soft and well educated, lighter than expected. His tweed jacket and shiny brown brogues looked expensive. ‘I only came because I have to go away to my family’s place in Leicestershire for Christmas and I was keen to catch up with Geoff before I went.’
As Nancy snatched at the hay and started to chew, Brenda and Giles left the barn and saw that the farmhouse door was already closed so they joined Geoff by his car.
‘Keep an eye on Dorothy,’ he told her, leaning one arm on the roof. ‘She’d almost passed out by the time we arrived here. I only just managed to get the pills down her in time.’
‘All right; will do. What do I look out for exactly?’
‘If she says she has pains in her chest then that’s the time to involve Doc Brownlee, double-quick. Otherwise, make sure she has plenty to drink. And keep her in bed, like I said.’
Brenda stood back to let Giles slide into the passenger seat while Geoff went round to the driver’s side. She watched them drive out of the yard, then stood for a moment, taking in deep gulps of cold night air and gazing up at a sky glittering with stars.
Back inside the billet, she found Evelyn still huddled in the blanket, not crying now but staring at the flickering candles with a dazed expression. She didn’t look up at Brenda.
‘What can I do for you?’ Brenda sat down next to her, feeling helpless. ‘Are you warm enough? Do you want to borrow one of my jumpers?’
Evelyn shook her head. ‘How can I have been so stupid?’
‘You weren’t. Cliff was.’
‘I was, though. I should’ve known.’
‘What; that he was already married? I don’t think so. No woman expects a man to keep quiet about something like that.’
‘But when he said we couldn’t announce our engagement – I should’ve put two and two together.’ Evelyn raked back through the cold ashes of the excuses she’d heard from Cliff: it was too soon to break the news, it was the danger of Weatherall chucking them out or the difficulty of finding other jobs. ‘I should have taken a step back and thought it through.’
‘Listen, you didn’t do anything wrong. I’ll bet he was the one who went down on bended knee.’
‘He did. He swore he loved me and wanted to marry me and like a fool I said yes.’
‘Because you loved him,’ Brenda pointed out. ‘No doubt you fell for him hook, line and sinker. Whereas, me and my fiancé …’
Evelyn glanced up at her for the first time.
‘Never mind.’ Brenda quickly changed tack. ‘It can’t have been easy for you, not being able to tell anyone. Joyce and I would never have found out if it hadn’t been for that silly goose Dorothy letting the cat out of the bag.’
‘The thing is, I believed in Cliff. Let’s face it, I wanted to believe in him, more fool me! And it turns out he was right about one important thing: other estate managers would have been bound to ask awkward questions about Cliff’s state of health. So if Colonel Weatherall had kicked us out of Acklam for getting engaged, Cliff might well have been on the scrap heap, with no money and no job.’
‘Yes, I see.’ It didn’t excuse the rest of it, though. Or quite why Evelyn had put up with watching him flirt with other girls, including Brenda herself, and generally behaving as if he was single and fancy-free. ‘He’s a good-looking chap; I can understand why you’d fall for him in a big way.’
‘It was his eyes,’ Evelyn tried to explain. ‘How can a girl fall in love with someone just because of the way he looks at her?’
‘Because!’ That was the way it worked.
‘It was just like it happens in books and films: love at first sight. Me standing in the yard with my suitcase, him walking out of the wood; Cliff didn’t even have to open his mouth.’
Brenda felt a twinge of envy. ‘It was d
ifferent with me and Les,’ she admitted reluctantly. ‘It took quite a while to decide that I loved him. I thought he was a pleasant enough chap, with a nice twinkle in his eye. But we went out quite a few times, to the pub and for drives in his car, before it got more serious. Les is a quiet type and I was – well, let’s just say that I’d had my fingers burned more than once.’
‘I wish I’d taken things more slowly,’ Evelyn admitted. ‘The trouble is, I didn’t hold back.’ She felt her face grow warm as she remembered her first time in bed with Cliff: waiting for Weatherall’s light to go off, creeping across the yard to the cottage for a prearranged tryst, and then, almost before she knew it, lying in bed beside him and feeling like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Brenda understood exactly what she meant. ‘War changes things. We rush in because we know we only live once. After all, who’s to say when a bomb will drop and blow us all to smithereens?’ Les was this minute on his Royal Navy patrol up the west coast of Scotland, dodging U-boats, protecting his country’s fleet of battleships. Grace’s Bill was currently sweating it out in Burma, while Joyce’s Edgar was safer now, not dicing nightly but flying reconnaissance missions instead. Still, safety was relative. Edgar might actually be up there in the starry sky as they spoke, flying his Spitfire into a hail of bullets.
‘We forget what our mothers taught us,’ Evelyn agreed. ‘According to Mum, in her day, everyone behaved themselves until they got married. They kept one foot on the ground, like in love scenes in the cinema; she said they had to if they didn’t want to get a bad name. Perhaps it was better that way.’
‘I’m really not sure. In any case, there’s no going back for either of us.’
‘Are you sorry?’
Brenda thought long and hard. ‘Not really. On the whole, I think it’s better to know what you’re letting yourself in for in that regard. In the old days you could marry a man and then the physical side of things would turn out to be a big disappointment that you’d be stuck with for the rest of your life.’
Evelyn managed a weak smile. ‘You don’t mince your words; I’ll say that.’
‘It’s true, though. If you do it beforehand, you have a pretty clear idea of how much you enjoy it.’
‘Or how little.’
‘Exactly. That’s what I’m getting at.’ Brenda got up to block the draught blowing in under the door with a rolled-up towel, allowing the candles to burn more steadily. ‘For me it made all the difference; it made my feelings for Les stronger. I knew that he was the man for me, even though his brother carried on being a pest and Hettie took a long time to come round to the idea that Les and I were engaged.’
‘I’d say the same about my first time with Cliff. I’d never done it with Jim, my first beau – we were too young and we never had much time to ourselves, what with Mum always lurking round the corner. But with Cliff it all fell into place and it felt marvellous, exciting and frightening all at once, like being bowled over by a big wave and having it swirl and crash over your head. There was no way of getting back on my feet, or if I did, Cliff would be there and we’d do it again and my legs would be swept from under me time after time.’
‘You were happy for it to happen?’
‘I was and I wasn’t. Cliff isn’t one for talking, either in or out of bed. There was never time to discuss what was happening between us, and anyway I doubt if I could have found the right words. “I love you” was all we ever said. He thinks that’s enough.’
‘Whereas you would have liked a bit more – the whys and wherefores?’
Evelyn nodded. ‘We women give up a lot to be with a man. Or I did. All of a sudden it was as though I wasn’t my own person any more. I was always waiting for the next time I saw Cliff, holding my breath and wondering if a kiss would lead to the next thing and the next, or if he would give me the cold shoulder and take out one of his bad moods on me and pretend in public that there was nothing between us.’
‘You’re right; we lose a lot of our freedom,’ Brenda observed. ‘Why on earth do we do it?’
‘Because we love them!’ they said together then laughed quietly.
‘It’s what you call a vicious circle. And now all we can do is sit here and talk about it.’ Brenda pulled a clean pair of pyjamas from a drawer and tossed them to Evelyn. ‘You don’t mind topping and tailing with me?’
‘No.’ She was thankful and completely drained. She said she would be able to sleep on a bed of nails.
‘Good. I’ll turn my back while you get changed.’ Brenda stood, arms folded, staring at a picture on the wall that showed Merle Oberon on the film set of Wuthering Heights: wasp-waisted, with her crinoline skirt billowing in the wind. ‘Do you feel better now you’ve got it off your chest?’
Evelyn took off her silvery grey dance dress then put on Brenda’s pyjamas. ‘Better?’ she mused. ‘Not so much as if I’ve been steamrollered. I’m bruised and battered – yes, but still standing. So I suppose I do.’
‘And tomorrow?’
She buttoned up the jacket then slid into bed. ‘Tomorrow is a new day. Let’s wait and see what it brings.’
Next morning Evelyn woke with a start. Early dawn light crept in under the door and a strong wind blew through the gap beneath Brenda’s wagon, making it rock from side to side. Captain! Evelyn realized she must cycle over to Acklam right away to give her horse fresh water and hay.
So she slid quietly from the bed, doing her best not to disturb Brenda.
‘Where are you sneaking off to at this hour?’ a sleepy voice asked.
‘Sorry to wake you. I have to shoot off home to see to Captain.’
Brenda’s face emerged from under the blankets and she saw Evelyn zipping up her dance dress. ‘You’ll catch your death. Why not borrow a pair of my dungarees?’
‘Right you are.’ This made sense and soon Evelyn was sensibly dressed and ready to leave.
‘Will you be back in time for church?’ Brenda asked as she turned towards the wall, intending to get more shut-eye.
‘I’m not sure. You go ahead; don’t wait for me.’
‘All right. You know where to find me if you need me.’
Evelyn opened the door to a blast of chilly air. She closed it firmly then tiptoed past the barn where Nancy was housed, past the hen hut full of clucking Rhode Island Reds then around the new rabbit hutch whose occupants slept in their nests of straw and shredded newspaper. The puddles in the yard were frozen solid.
From an upstairs window Cliff watched her depart.
It was no good; Brenda couldn’t get back to sleep. The wind shook the wagon and rattled at the barn doors. It lifted a metal dustbin lid and sent it clattering across the flags. The goat woke up and brayed. The cockerel crowed. The farmhouse door opened then banged shut.
So she crept out of bed and into the warmest clothes she could find: dungarees over pyjama bottoms, two jerseys and two pairs of socks. Putting on her fleece-lined pilot’s jacket and jamming her feet into her gumboots, she opened the door and braced herself for the onslaught of wind and cold.
Her first job of the morning was to go into the barn and milk the blessed goat. Straight after that she would go into the house and ask about Dorothy.
It sounded straightforward until it turned out that Nancy wasn’t prepared to cooperate.
‘Stand still, there’s a good girl.’ Brenda set down her stool and metal pail inside the black goat’s stall.
Nancy flattened her ears and bared her teeth. She kicked out with her back legs then bucked high in the air, knocking over the empty bucket with a loud clatter.
‘Steady on. The sooner we get this over with the better.’
The goat stared balefully at Brenda then lowered her head and prepared to charge. Brenda picked up her pail and hurriedly backed out of the stall. She was in the nick of time – Nancy butted her horns against the closing door with a dull thud.
‘Please yourself.’ Brenda decided to come back later and emerged from the barn just as Cliff drove h
is car around the side of the house where it had been parked out of sight. She grimaced when she saw him behind the wheel: unshaven, with his jacket collar turned up, glaring at her as she crossed the yard.
Funnily enough, she hadn’t given a thought to where he might have gone after last night’s scene on the green; if not back to Acklam then perhaps to the Cross Keys to drown his sorrows, or even into town in hot pursuit of Gladys and Muriel. So it came as a surprise to realize that he’d spent the night in his father’s house, only a few yards from where she and Evelyn had slept.
Cliff put his foot on the brake, making the back wheels slew sideways across a patch of black ice. He came to a halt and wound down his window. ‘Why didn’t you tell me what had happened to Dorothy?’
‘Why didn’t you ask?’ she shot back.
He scowled at her. ‘How was I to know that she was having one of her dos?’
Brenda shivered in spite of the layers of clothes. It was already clear that Cliff Huby was the sort who never took responsibility for his actions; even so it was a shock to hear him talk so unfeelingly about his own sister. ‘How is she this morning?’ she asked pointedly.
‘Still fast asleep, as far as I know.’
‘Is your father up?’
He nodded once, sniffed as if at a bad smell then wound up his window and drove on without a word.
Inside the house Brenda found Bernard setting out a tray with a cup of tea and a plate of toast and marmalade. His clothes looked as if they’d been slept in and his hair was uncombed. His hand shook as he poured the tea.
‘How is she?’ Brenda kicked off her boots.
‘She looks like death warmed up,’ he reported, unscrewing the top off a bottle of white pills and carefully tipping two into his palm. His hands were calloused, the nails split and dirty. ‘She said she didn’t want any breakfast but I’ve made this toast anyway. And Geoff said to be sure she took her pills.’ He tilted them from his hand on to the tray.
‘Shall I take it up and sit with her for a while?’
He nodded. ‘You’ve already been a big help, but yes, please.’