A Wartime Wife

by Lizzie Lane

  Mrs Riley made the sign of the cross over her scrawny breasts. ‘God rest his soul, poor heathen that he was. It won’t be easy for them to come quickly, foreign as they are. Polish or some such like and still over in them parts. There is a war on, though saying that, I can’t be waiting until someone turns up and I knew of your reputation. I know you won’t fleece me. Besides, who knows … if the syrup don’t work, you may be needing some closer attention so a bit of generosity won’t go amiss.’

  Mary Anne stiffened at the thought of the same needle that knitted a woolly hat or gloves also being used to terminate a pregnancy. She’d go down on her knees before sleeping tonight and pray the contents of the brown bottle worked. It took a lot of effort, but she swallowed her revulsion.

  ‘Five shillings,’ she murmured, taking her notebook and pencil from its home beneath the boiler. ‘I’ll need your details for my register.’

  ‘If you could hurry. It’s almost six.’

  Mary Anne jerked up from what she was writing. ‘Six? It can’t be!’

  It was, and her shrewdness turned to panic as a sudden hammering echoed through the house and out into the backyard.

  Mrs Riley nodded squirrel-like at the crack in the door towards the back of the house.

  ‘Sounds like yer old man’s home. Been down the Red Cow no doubt and now wantin’ feedin’.’

  Mary Anne bristled and pursed her lips. Henry was her problem. She wanted to say ‘Mind your own business,’ but she wanted Mrs Riley to leave and quickly. ‘Here’s your receipt.’

  A slim slip torn from the bottom of the notebook, the bottom corner numbered to coincide with the top corner, was swiftly exchanged for the five shillings.

  ‘You’d better go now.’ If she sounded rude, she didn’t care. She didn’t like Mrs Riley. She didn’t like her sort. She was only here on sufferance because she was in a pickle.

  Thrusting two half-crowns into Mrs Riley’s podgy palm, Mary Anne bundled the woman out of the door, pointing her towards the back gate. ‘Get out that way. I don’t want my husband to see you.’

  Mrs Riley waved a hand as though she were swatting a fly. ‘I knows what you means. That five bob ’uld be over the bar of the nearest pub. I used to ’ave one like that – drunk before dinner and sozzled before supper … Powdered glass – put that in his grub. That’ll calm ’im down,’ said Mrs Riley. ‘Killed mine stone dead.’

  ‘Be on yer way. I’ll mark you down and trust you without yer signature. You’ve got the five bob, now it’s five and six if you want the tablecloth back. You’ve got a week.’

  She wondered whether Mrs Riley really had used powdered glass to do away with her husband.

  ‘You know where to find me, Mrs Randall. Every woman around here knows where to find me …’ Hesitating, she grinned as though there was a secret bond between them that would forever remain that way – if she chose it to be so. ‘You might be needin’ to see me again, specially if the stuff don’t work.’

  Mary Anne replied through gritted teeth. ‘Well, let’s hope it do.’ Mentally, she promised herself she’d do all in her power not to allow the situation to arise again, though how she’d keep Henry Randall from claiming his ‘rights’ would be far from easy. He sulked if she refused him, his temper building up like a spoiled child about to throw a tantrum, although in his case it was normally a fist.

  The hammering at the front door intensified. He never came round to the back door – thank God. Slamming the ledger shut she hurriedly put it back into its hiding place.

  ‘All right, all right,’ she shouted, safe in the knowledge that he couldn’t possibly hear. ‘That door will be off its hinges going on like that.’

  She threw the tablecloth in the cupboard above the boiler. She had a sneaking suspicion Mrs Riley wouldn’t be back for it. She certainly hoped not. The vision of it sparkling on her parlour table wouldn’t go away.

  She hid the bottle behind the boiler with the ledger. No one must know she had it, and no one would. It was rare for her girls to help her with the washing, and then only under duress and later in the day when her clients had all done their business. Some husbands worked shifts. Few wives were inclined to let their other halves know that their wages had to be supplemented; men had pride. Still others didn’t want their husbands to know that they had vices. It was amazing what went on in Kent Street – some women drank, some couldn’t resist a flutter on cards or on the horses and still others couldn’t stop buying hats or shoes.

  Henry Albert Randall was still beating the hell out of the front door and singing in a deep baritone that must have all the neighbours hanging out of their windows. Her husband’s efforts to find the keyhole when he was drunk always attracted an audience, and her face reddened at the prospect. Why did she put up with it? She knew why. For her children.

  The sound of raucous singing …

  ‘Onward Christian soldiers, Marching as to war …’

  She pushed her hair back from her brow. At least she’d look respectable even if Henry were far from that.

  Muttering disapproval under her breath and adding a small prayer that he wouldn’t be too drunk but merely be merry, she pulled the door open.

  Her heart sank. Her stomach tightened. The brim of Henry Randall’s hat nestled around his neck, only the crown remaining on his fair wavy hair. Solemn-faced as a Sunday preacher, his hands were clasped before him as if in prayer.

  ‘I’m callin’ collectin’ for the church, madam,’ he pronounced, his voice sonorous though slurred.

  Despite not wanting to rouse his temper, Mary Anne couldn’t help feeling mortified. Just as she’d guessed, curtains were twitching up and down the street, and women gossiping in doorways watched silently or tittered behind their hands.

  ‘Henry Randall!’ she hissed, grabbing his coat lapel and dragging him over the polished brass doorstep. ‘Get in here!’

  She glanced up and down the street as she bundled him past her, through the doorway and into the passageway.

  Two gossiping neighbours, huddled against an open door immediately opposite, were staring boldly, grinning as though Henry were providing a comedy turn purely for their benefit.

  Mary Anne glared at them, dabbing her finger on the tip of her nose. ‘Had your eyeful or want your penny back,’ she shouted, tapping the end of her nose with her finger once more before slamming the door hard enough to set the whole house shuddering.

  She imagined them talking about her, calling her a stuck-up cow because she didn’t talk like them, didn’t look like them and hadn’t come from the same district or class. She was different and would always be set apart.

  Once the door was closed, her embarrassment got the better of her judgement. Why couldn’t he be different? Why did he have to get drunk? Why couldn’t he be like Edward, the man she should have married?

  Nothing – not even fear – could stop her from lashing out.

  Standing with her hands braced on her hips, her eyes blazed with anger.

  ‘You certainly have not been to any church, that’s for sure, unless the Red Cow has had a pulpit installed!’

  Edward wouldn’t have behaved like this. Edward had been upright, brave and kind to everyone. Why did he have to die? Why had there been that other war?

  By way of supporting himself, Henry spread his palms on one wall of the narrow hallway, his heels against the skirting on the opposite wall, as though laughing were too much for his body.

  He tilted forwards, face close to hers. She winced as the smell of stale stout wafted over her.

  There was contempt in her eyes and a grim set to her chin that wasn’t there when he was just coming out of his drunken state. When he was like this, in the heart of his drunkenness, she could say and do whatever she wanted.

  ‘Good God, you stink as though you’ve been swimming in it. Now get upstairs and sleep it off.’

  A strong whiff of carbolic from her own hands mixed with the stink of stout as she gripped him by the scruff of his collar and the s
eat of his pants and frogmarched him along the passage, their heavy footsteps thundering over the uneven floorboards.

  The front door opened – Lizzie, her eldest daughter, choosing that moment to come home from work. She looked amused when she saw her father. ‘Oh, Dad. Drunk again?’

  He grinned at her. ‘My sweet little bird. You know I loves you, don’t you, my darling. You knows I loves you.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Lizzie answered, laughing and pressing herself against the wall as he tumbled back to within a few feet of the front door before her mother pushed him towards the narrow stairs.

  ‘What a state,’ said Mary Anne, the sour expression replaced with one of amiable toleration now that Lizzie was home. Lizzie would not see how it really was between them; none of her children would. She’d vowed from the day their firstborn had entered the world that this would be a happy house, that no matter her regrets, no hint of unhappiness would ever touch her children’s lives. ‘I told him it might be a good idea if he takes his bed down there.’

  ‘Just enjoying meself, but yer mother don’t like me doing that,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘You can tell that. Look at yer mother’s face. She don’t like me to enjoy meself.’

  Mary Anne adopted the usual smile reserved for such a situation.

  ‘You go on and put the kettle on, Lizzie. I’ll be right back down once I’ve settled yer Dad. And if you could nip out into the scullery and bring in that pot of potatoes. Put it straight on the gas stove. The salt’s already in them.’

  She said it in a very matter-of-fact way, as though that’s all it would be: settling him down so he’d sleep it off and they’d all have dinner together, just one happy family.

  In truth every muscle in her body tensed at the thought of what would truly come once he awoke.

  Burdened bedsprings squealed in protest as he fell onto the bed in the front bedroom they’d shared since the day they were married. Mary Anne eased off his boots and placed them neatly at the foot of the bed. He was snoring fit to wake the devil even before she’d straightened up, rubbing at the ache in her lower back. She stared at him as she would a stranger. This was her husband, the man that had been chosen for her to marry. His mouth hung wide open. A sliver of spittle trailed from the corner of his mouth to the tip of his moustache.

  Was it her imagination or were the walls of the room closing in on her, the air stale although she could see a curtain blowing in the draught from an ill-fitting window. She didn’t recognise her discomfort as resentment, but only knew that something threatened to suffocate her.

  He was too big and ugly for the tiny room that she had tried so hard to make pretty. Tiny mauve flowers, painted with gay abandon by virtue of a small set of watercolours someone had pledged and never redeemed, decorated the whitewashed walls. Amongst the smaller, scattered buds, she’d painted bouquets of similar blooms, but larger and bordered with other colours of paint to look like frames. Other pictures in real frames had once hung on the walls, hurled and smashed when Henry had one of his moods. These events never happened when the children were there. Violence was the provenance between man and wife and occurred only when they were alone.

  Was this the same man as the one who used to make her laugh and took her dancing? Had he really been any different than Edward?

  Edward had been from the same background as she; his father had been a manager at a rope-making company. Her father had owned a grocery shop. They’d been heralded as the ideal couple. A few years and they would have been married. Unfortunately, the shooting of the Austrian emperor in 1914 had heralded the Great War.

  Edward hadn’t joined up until 1916, so they’d had a few years together. Only a few months into the conflict, in the depths of winter, he had died, not shot or gassed by the enemy but taken by pneumonia.

  Six months before his death and convinced they would always be together, that he would somehow survive the war, they’d made love before his departure. A child had been conceived.

  The child had been adopted and only six months later she’d met Henry. He’d lifted her spirits and, encouraged by her parents, they’d married without him ever knowing that there’d been someone else and that she wasn’t a virgin.

  That first year had been idyllic; it seemed that nothing could come between them, so Mary Anne had confessed her sin.

  ‘There was Edward before you,’ she’d told him. ‘Three months after he got killed I gave birth to his child. At my parents’ insistence, the child was adopted. And then I met you. And my parents said …’

  Simple facts uttered in innocence but received with a darkening countenance by a man who never forgave her.

  Everything changed.

  The considerate husband, who had been proud to serve his country, had considered himself cheated. His mood had changed. No longer attentive and kind, he’d turned jealous and quick to anger. No matter what she did, he’d never changed back to the man she’d married.

  Memories of the time before her marriage and romantic dreams of Edward were what kept her sane. She had transferred her love to her children and they were what kept the marriage going.

  But Edward was her solace. Unknown to Henry, she still had his letters.

  At the thought of them, she eyed the walnut dressing table that had once belonged to her mother. There was a drawer on either side beneath the mirror. Inside of each was another drawer tucked back out of the way and unseen unless you knew they were there.

  Sometimes, when her spirits were low and she was in the house alone, she retrieved those letters, sadness stabbing at her heart as her fingers touched the crisp paper, reading and remembering the hopes and dreams that had come to nothing.

  Henry worked as hard as anyone driving one of the city’s blue cabs, his permanent pitch being outside Temple Meads Station. The tips could be decent if he was lucky enough to pick up some ‘big pot’ fares. When it wasn’t in use, he kept the vehicle in a garage in South Street. Unfortunately, there were a number of pubs between South Street and Kent Street and by the looks of his clothes and the smell of his breath he’d been in every one. With Henry it was a case of grab the housekeeping whenever possible, though you wouldn’t think so to hear him.

  ‘You should all be grateful to me for keeping you fed and warm; not like when I was a young whippersnapper, out to work at five in the morning earning two bob a week looking after the milkman’s horse. Ten years old I was, just ten years old.’

  Harry, Daw and Lizzie adopted an attitude of smiling forbearance, telling him that of course they knew, and of course they were grateful. Young Stanley was oblivious to it all.

  The reality was different, though unacknowledged by Henry.

  After a good rummage, she went back down the stairs, the coins she’d lifted from his coat pocket swiftly counted from one hand to the other.

  Lizzie looked up from unbuckling her shoes and rubbing at her toes.

  Mary Anne noticed, her face buckling with concern. ‘Are those shoes pinching you?’

  Lizzie grimaced. ‘Just a bit. Still, they’re fine for work.’ She steeled herself for what was coming. Just as she expected, a slight frown creased her mother’s brows.

  ‘Here,’ said Mary Anne, fishing under her skirt and taking out a pound note then a ten shilling note. ‘Get yourself a new pair.’

  Even as a child, Lizzie had noticed that her mother couldn’t bear for her children to suffer any discomfort or misfortune in their lives. She’d always insisted on making things better. As children they’d appreciated her indulgence; as adults Lizzie was beginning to regard her selflessness as interference.

  ‘Ma! I’ve just told you. There’s no need. They’ll be OK for work.’

  Mary Anne turned huffy. ‘OK? What does that mean? Why can’t you say something English?’

  Lizzie immediately felt guilty. She hadn’t meant to hurt her mother. Mary Anne’s intentions were good, but sometimes Lizzie felt smothered.

  ‘Everyone says it in the pictures. It’s American. You know it is
.’

  Her mother pounced on cushions, beating them into shape before crushing them back into their respective chairs, putting things away in drawers, slamming them so hard that the cups hanging from hooks on the dresser tinkled like bells.

  ‘Well, this isn’t the pictures and it isn’t America!’

  Lizzie deliberately massaged her toes again, her hair falling around her face and hiding her expression. She would say nothing until her mother had worked her disappointment out of her system.

  No word was spoken until the crashing and slamming of dresser doors and drawers had slowed; until in effect there was nothing more to put away.

  Her mother had never been much good at taking ‘no’ for an answer. Lizzie waited for what she was certain would come next.

  The one pound and ten shilling note appeared beneath her bent head.

  ‘Go on. Take it. Buy yourself something nice.’

  Lizzie sighed, stood up and covered her mother’s hand with her own.

  ‘You buy yourself something nice, Ma. Do something special with it. I earn me own wage now. Spend it on yerself. You deserve it.’

  ‘Me?’ The tone of her voice and the look on her face said it all. She wasn’t used to spending on herself. Her children were her world. ‘What in the world do I need?’ Her smile was hesitant and accompanied by a shrug.

  ‘Oh, Ma,’ she said, throwing her arms around her mother’s neck. ‘You deserve all the best things money can buy.’

  ‘It can’t buy me love,’ she said, her voice muffled against Lizzie’s hair.

  ‘No,’ said Lizzie, cupping her mother’s face in her hands. ‘It can’t. You’ve got my love, Ma, and you always will no matter what you do.’

  There were tears in her mother’s eyes when she smiled. ‘You are a good daughter,’ she said softly.

  ‘And you are a good mother, but we’re not babies any more. You deserve something for yourself.’

  Unless they really knew her well, or were like everyone else in the family, took her too much for granted, they wouldn’t have noticed that her smile stiffened and that her eye colour changed with the thoughts behind them.