Kissed a Sad Goodbye

by Deborah Crombie

  “You wound me, Lewis. I might even think you find me distasteful,” Freddie said in his most dangerous drawl. “I’ll wager you don’t say that to Irene when she touches you. It’s quite unfair, don’t you think, that her fair face should render her your favor?”

  “You leave Irene out of this,” said Lewis, not understanding everything Freddie had said, but hearing the threat.

  “Oh, but you’re the one who won’t leave Irene alone, Lewis. I’ve seen the way you look at her. I’ve even seen the way you touch her when you think no one’s looking. And sometimes I do wonder what Edwina would think if she knew …” He smiled and Lewis backed up another step.

  “You don’t seriously think she would approve, do you, boy? You can’t seriously think Edwina would consider a trumped-up barrow boy good enough for her own niece? Because you’ll never be good enough. You’ll never be anything but slum rubbish, no matter how much education you have, no matter how hard you try to speak like a gentleman—” He leaned forward and hissed, “You will never be one. You do understand that, Lewis?”

  Lewis stared at the drop of spittle that had collected at the corner of Freddie’s ruined mouth, hoping desperately that if he kept his mind on some small and disgusting detail, the words would bounce away harmlessly, like hail against the slates.

  “Answer me, boy.” The ruler appeared in Freddie’s hand as if by magic.

  Then came the sound of voices in the hall, and a moment later William and Irene burst in, laughter dying on their lips as they took in the faces before them.

  “Aren’t we eager this morning,” drawled Freddie, making a quick recovery, while Lewis slipped back into his chair and bent over his copybook.

  Freddie started them on drills, but the atmosphere in the schoolroom was more uneasy than usual, and Lewis found it impossible to meet Irene’s eyes.

  By midmorning they were sweating from the heat, and Freddie had begun the restless pacing that Lewis had learned meant trouble was brewing.

  After a bit, Freddie stopped behind William and looked over his shoulder until William began to fidget. Then he said, conversationally, “Have you seen the papers this morning, William? They’re reporting a successful bombing run last night over Germany, a score of direct hits. Of course”—he paused—“it’s too bad some of those targets happened to be in heavily populated areas.”

  William went white, then pressed his lips together, refusing to be baited. They all knew his views on civilian bombings. It was a subject he and Lewis had avoided by mutual consent after a few charged discussions.

  William had argued that any civilian deaths were unconscionable, whatever the victim’s nationality, and that Lewis should feel the same because of what had happened to his parents—while to Lewis it seemed just the opposite, and he couldn’t understand how William could condone restraint against the Germans after what they had done to London.

  “Women, children …,” Freddie clucked sympathetically, and turned on his heel, pacing again. “Of course, there were pilots shot down, too, and that is rather a shame, wouldn’t you agree?” He stopped near his desk and studied William. “Or perhaps you wouldn’t agree with that, dear Will? Perhaps your sympathies lie elsewhere?” Reaching into his desk, he pulled out a twine-wrapped bundle and brought it over, dropping it on the table before them. “I do think you could spend your time in the attic a bit more profitably.”

  William reached out a hand as if to snatch the bundle, but Freddie tapped him on the knuckles with the ruler and drawled, “I imagine Lewis and Irene would like to see what you’ve been doing.” He jerked at the twine, and leaflets spilled out across the tabletop.

  Lewis stared curiously, then with growing horror as he realized what they were—pacifist tracts, with a crudely drawn cartoon showing a leering RAF pilot deliberately strafing a fleeing German child.

  “I … they sent them to me, this group in London,” protested William. “I hadn’t given them out to anyone.” He reached for them again, but once more Freddie interceded, gathering them back into a bundle.

  “I’ll keep these for you,” Freddie said kindly. “Just in case Edwina or any of her friends at the War Office should want to see them.”

  Eyes on William, Lewis said, “How could you do such a thing?” He stood up, past caring if it made Freddie angry. “I think they’re … they’re disgusting.”

  “I didn’t mean—” William began, but Lewis had pushed back his chair and started for the door. “Lewis, wait!” William shouted after him.

  Lewis glanced back, once, before slamming the schoolroom door shut behind him, and the expressions on their faces stayed burned into his memory—Irene, her brow furrowed with concern, her lips shaping his name; William, his eyes dark with fright; and Freddie, the good half of his face stretched into a grimace of satisfaction.

  HE KNEW HIS FATHER’S HABITS. LEWIS would leave his office midafternoon to check round the building sites—he never trusted anyone else to get things right; that was one of the things that had made working with him impossible. And so Gordon waited near the gunmetal-gray Mercedes in the Heron Quays car park, smoking, watching the sky darken as heavy banks of clouds moved in from the west. The stifling air smelled faintly sulphurous.

  Gordon had given up trying to prepare what he would say. His mind was blank, suspended between fragmented thoughts of Annabelle and a recurring memory of his father lifting him from the waves when he was a child. When he saw Lewis come round the end of the building, he ground out his cigarette with the heel of his boot and moved to intercept him.

  “Dad.”

  Lewis looked up, hand on the Mercedes’s door. “Gordon! What are you doing here?”

  “I need to speak to you.”

  “We can go back in the office—”

  “No, here. I want to know what happened the night Annabelle died. She came to see you, didn’t she?”

  “I never knew until that night that there was something between you. I’d not have kept on seeing her—”

  “You couldn’t let me have one thing you hadn’t stamped as yours, could you? You always had—”

  “No, it wasn’t like that,” Lewis said tiredly, and Gordon saw lines in his father’s face he hadn’t noticed before. “I never meant to hurt you—I never meant to hurt Annabelle—”

  “Then why did you plan to cheat her?”

  “How did you know about that?” Lewis said quietly.

  “You’re a fucking hypocrite, Lewis Finch. After you spent years drumming the importance of integrity into me, it turns out you’re no better than all the rest. Annabelle told me that night what you’d done—”

  “You wouldn’t understand. It wasn’t about Annabelle. It wasn’t even about the business, except as a means to an end.”

  “And what end was that?”

  “I wanted to take something from him, something he loved as much as I loved Irene, and Edwina, and he always cared more for the business and his bloody family name than he did people. But it’s nothing to do with you—”

  “Do you mean William Hammond? Did you kill Annabelle to get back at William Hammond?” Gordon was shouting, past caring if anyone heard.

  “What?” Lewis sounded utterly baffled. “What are you talking about?”

  “When she came to see you, she told you the deal was off, didn’t she? And she told you she loved me—she said she meant to prove she loved me—and you killed her!”

  “You think I killed Annabelle?” Lewis spoke slowly, as if trying to get it clear in his own head, and for the first time Gordon felt doubt. “But I thought you … When she left that night I thought it was you she was going to see.… I was afraid …”

  Gordon stared at his father. “Are you saying that all this time you thought it was me?” His throat tightened with a wave of relief he wasn’t sure he could allow himself to feel. “And I thought … they said it was someone who loved her, someone who laid her body out so carefully, and I couldn’t believe that you’d killed her and just left her.…”
/>   “Laid her body out?”

  “They said she looked serene.…” Gordon saw that his father was no longer listening.

  “I should have seen it from the beginning,” Lewis said softly, his gaze still far away. A gust swirled dust and rubbish round their ankles, and in the west lightning arced from cloud to cloud.

  “Seen what?”

  Lewis yanked open the door of the Mercedes. “This time I’m not going to let him get away with it.”

  “What are you talking about? Let who get away with it?” As Gordon reached for his father, the slamming car door brushed the tips of his fingers. “Dad!”

  But Lewis was already reversing out of the parking space, and the spinning tires threw grit into Gordon’s eyes as the car accelerated away.

  CHAPTER 15 Trade-union and community campaigns to prevent this decline were transmuted in the 1980s into campaigns to redevelop the area in the best interests of local people, to encourage investment which would bring more jobs, to improve transport, schooling and health care. Alongside these concerns was a concern that the community should not lose touch with its roots.

  Eve Hostettler, from Memories of

  Childhood on the Isle of Dogs, 1870–1970

  “We could use a bit of rain, old girl,” said George Brent. He was on his knees in the vegetable patch in his back garden, with Sheba sitting beside him, watching him as if he might turn up something tasty. “Marrows are getting to be as scrawny as I am, in this blasted heat.”

  Sheba lifted her sleek black muzzle, sniffing the air, and George straightened his back a bit as he sniffed, too. His nose wasn’t what it used to be, but he could smell rain, and the sky to the west looked thunderous. “Rheumatism’s playing up—that’s a good sign,” he added as he stood and worked the stiffness from his joints. “Maybe we’d best pick them ripe tomatoes, just in case.” He was proud of his tomatoes—he started them early in the spring, on the kitchen windowsill, and bragged on them to the neighbors whenever the opportunity arose. Reaching for the basket he’d left on the grass, he bent to the task and had it half filled when he heard a whistle and a shout from the house.

  “Dad. What are you doing out here in the garden with a storm coming on, you stubborn old goat?”

  “Eh, lad, come and give me a hand,” called George, beaming at the sight of his only son, who had been out on his merchant ship these past two weeks.

  A large, good-natured man with dark, curling hair just beginning to recede, George Brent, Jr. was never called anything other than “Georgie.” He strode across the small square of lawn and thumped his dad on the shoulder, then took the basket. “These will make a proper feast with the sausages I’ve brought for tea, and I’ve put the kettle on.”

  “Good lad.”

  When they had settled at the small, oilclothed table with their sausages, fried bread, tomatoes, and steaming cups of tea, George proceeded to tell his son about the events that had taken place in his absence. He could talk now about finding the body without getting a lump in his throat, and in every telling the red-haired young woman grew more and more beautiful. “Like an angel, she was,” he said now, wiping up the last of his tomato with a bit of bread, and thinking of Lewis Finch with a twinge of guilt. He couldn’t quite bring himself to tell Georgie what he had confessed to Janice Coppin.

  A crack of thunder rattled the crockery on the shelves and Sheba yipped. “This one’s going to be a corker,” George said, but as he poured them another cuppa, he wished he could bring the image that had been nagging at him into focus. A face seen at the wrong time and in the wrong place, it hovered at the very edge of his consciousness. He gave up, shaking his head in disgust, and proceeded to inform his son that perhaps that Janice wasn’t so bad after all.

  AS DROPS OF RAIN SPATTERED AGAINST the windscreen, Lewis put the wipers on delay and switched on the headlamps. He drove blindly, instinctively south, besieged by the memories he had kept buried for so long. He had thought he owned them, that he could use the knowledge of the past to fuel his hatred and yet remain unscathed. But he’d been wrong; he saw that now. And he saw, too late, that Annabelle had reminded him of Irene—

  I RENE HAD COME TO HIM THAT night, in his room over the stable.

  “Lewis,” she’d whispered, sitting on the edge of his bed and shaking his shoulder. “I want to talk to you.”

  He’d awakened instantly. “What are you doing here? You shouldn’t—”

  “It’ll be all right—they’re all asleep.” She settled herself more comfortably against his hip as he struggled to prop himself up on his elbows. “Listen, you mustn’t mind about William. You know he doesn’t mean any harm—”

  “That’s no excuse,” said Lewis, his anger rushing back. “Where does he think that sort of rubbish comes from? Straight from the Germans, that’s where. And when our men are dying—it could be John next, or Mr. Cuddy—”

  “He’s only thinking about innocent people being killed, and he doesn’t understand how you feel about your parents, not really. He thinks you can be logical about something like that—”

  “Logical? What does he bloody know about anything?” And to his shame, Lewis began to cry—the hiccuping, wrenching sobs he’d never let out, even at his parents’ funeral. Irene sat quite still, her hand on his shoulder, silent and concerned, and when he could manage, he said, “I know it’s stupid, but I keep thinking if I’d only been with them, I might have saved them somehow—”

  “Lewis, you’d have been killed, too, you know that. That’s the last thing your mum and dad would have wanted.” She pulled back his blanket and slid into bed beside him, wrapping her arms round him.

  “Irene—”

  “I want to be with you, Lewis. We could be bombed, too—the rockets fall short of their targets all the time—and I don’t want to die not knowing what it’s like.”

  She kissed him, pressing her body against his, and for a long moment he let go—then he pulled away, panting. “We can’t; what would Edwina—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she whispered, her mouth against his ear. “Nothing matters but us. Now. I want to be everything to you—mother, sister, lover—and I want you to need me more than you’ve ever needed anyone.”

  He felt her trembling against him, and when he kissed her she tasted of tears. She was right—no one had ever loved him like this. Nothing mattered but this. And then sensation washed his mind clean of any thought at all.

  L EWIS WOKE, AS HE USUALLY DID , when the first hint of dawn lightened the oblong of his window. Irene still lay beside him, her chest rising and falling gently as she slept. When he woke her, she sat up groggily and smiled at him.

  “I suppose I’d better get back before anyone stirs,” she said, yawning and snuggling back down under the covers.

  “You’d better hurry,” he urged. “You know how early Cook gets up sometimes.” As tempted as he was by her warm body against his, he felt suddenly uneasy, and he pushed her out of his bed with a hasty kiss.

  From his window, he watched her cross the yard in the faint gray light, and for an instant he could have sworn he saw a curtain twitch at one of the upstairs windows.

  A LTHOUGH L EWIS HAD KEPT HIS ROOM above the stable, he had for several years shared a bathroom on the second floor with William.

  That evening, after tea, he’d finished his bath and had just stepped from the tub when he heard the door open behind him. William, come to patch things up at last, he thought as he reached for his towel, but when he glanced up at the mirror he saw nothing but the fog from his bath. “It’s taken you long enough,” he said, determined to make light of it, for they had been avoiding one another all day.

  Then he heard hoarse breathing close by, and arms went round him, pinning him hard with his knees against the cast-iron tub.

  “Hasn’t it?” said Freddie, and Lewis felt him fumbling against him, and then came a searing pain.

  For an instant, he didn’t understand what was happening. Then, as Freddie thrust against him,
he began to struggle with all the strength of his rage and humiliation. Freddie tightened his grasp, hissing, “You’ll do what I want, boy. I saw her leave this morning—I know what you’ve been—”

  The door opened and Lewis wrenched himself round, but he couldn’t free himself from Freddie’s grip.

  William stood in the doorway.

  And Freddie smiled. “You know all about it, don’t you, William? You learned it at school. And if you know what’s good for you … and your little cause … you’ll bugger off … now.”

  William stood frozen, white-faced with shock, his hand raised, his lips parted in protest.

  Then he met Lewis’s eyes—and turned away. The door clicked shut behind him.

  GORDON STOOD OUTSIDE THE CALL BOX at Mudchute Station, staring at the smudged card he’d found in his trouser pocket. Gemma had given it to him the first time she’d come to his flat—it seemed ages ago, not a mere five days—and she’d scribbled her mobile number on the back.

  He’d already provided the police with enough information to damn his father—would he make things even worse by ringing her now? But as he turned away, he saw again Lewis’s face as he had sped off in the car, and an urgency that made his stomach feel hollow drove him back to the phone.

  When Gemma answered, he said without preamble, “Lewis didn’t kill Annabelle.”

  “Gordon?”

  “All the time I thought he’d killed her, he was thinking the same about me. And when he realized it wasn’t me, he said—it didn’t make sense.…”

  “Go on,” said Gemma, her voice tense.

  “He said …” Gordon paused, struggling to remember the exact words. “He said he should have known … and then something about not letting him get away with it again. Then he drove off.… He looked … I’m afraid he’ll do something crazy.…”