A Wartime Wife

by Lizzie Lane

  ‘And thank you for the money.’

  In her estimation it was far too much, but she guessed at his reasons. He wanted more customers. He also wanted friends.

  Michael Maurice was lonely. That was the decision she came to as she let herself out and the haunting strains of a trumpet drifted out into the empty shop.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Flossie Davies was tickled pink when Mary Anne presented her with four pounds ten for the trumpet.

  ‘Five shillings I already subbed you, and five shillings for going,’ explained Mary Anne.

  Flossie’s eyes stayed pinned on the money, hardly noticing that her baby was pulling the side of her mouth out of shape with sticky fat fingers and making her speak funny.

  ‘Not that I’ll tell that bleeder that I got that much,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell ’im two pounds. He’ll probably tip me half a crown from it for being so obliging – then expect me to be even more obliging once he gets back from the pub, if you gets my meaning.’ She made a guffawing sound – somewhere between a laugh and a sneer. ‘Fat chance!’

  Once she was alone, Mary Anne pulled the loose brick out from behind the boiler and took out an octagonal tea caddy with Chinese figures along its side. This served as her cash tin.

  Due to the dampness of the environment it lived in, the lid had rusted slightly and was usually difficult to prise off. Today it was less so, but Mary Anne did not regard it as irregular until she looked inside.

  The tin was divided into two layers. She kept the bulk of her money in the bottom compartment. The ‘current’ money – such as that the pawnbroker had given her for the trumpet and the mother of pearl vase – she’d placed on the top until such time as she’d settled with the vendors, Flossie and Aggie.

  It wasn’t there. It occurred to her it might have fluttered out without her noticing when she’d put it away. She’d been in a hurry at the time. As was his habit, Henry had been hammering at the front door, shouting to be let in. He never ever went through the arch and around the back of the house, and in case he might discover that she did more than laundry in the washhouse, Mary Anne had never encouraged it.

  Leaving the tin on top of the boiler, she got down on her hands and knees, peering into the gap left by removing the brick. She also probed behind the boiler’s supports.

  There was no sign of anything except cobwebs, crumbs of loose mortar and scurrying spiders.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Ouch!’ Mary Anne jerked up hitting her head on one of the boiler’s brick supports. She came face to face with Lizzie, who had a puzzled frown creasing her forehead above her clear, greyish-green eyes.

  Slapping the dirt from her hands and plastering a smile on her lips, Mary Anne got to her feet.

  ‘My scrubbing brush. I can’t find it. Never mind. It’ll turn up.’

  Lizzie’s attention had been diverted to the tea caddy. She was peering into its bottom layer where bundles of ten bob notes jostled with pound notes and fivers.

  ‘What’s all that money?’ Her voice was touched with wonder.

  Mary Anne opened her mouth to explain while racking her brain for a suitable excuse, and ended up stating the obvious. ‘It’s mine!’

  She pushed the money down beneath the partition and closed the lid. It didn’t alter the fact that money had been taken from her tin, but now was not the time to worry about it. Lizzie was still looking puzzled, her eyes going from the tin to the cupboards, one of which was presently unlocked, hanging open and exposing the items within.

  This particular cupboard held china: teapots, tea services, tureens never used, gravy boats and even a lustreware chamber pot, palm trees and a bright-blue camel etched into its honey-coloured surface.

  Lizzie’s face held a look of wonder. ‘What’s all this stuff?’

  Mary Anne slammed the door shut and turned the key. ‘Nothing for you to worry about.’

  Prevented from peering into an Aladdin’s cave of best china that had once graced many a front parlour in the neighbourhood, Lizzie’s gaze went back to the money and from there to her mother, her head tilted to one side and the frown remaining.

  There was no need for words. Mary Anne knew she was waiting for an explanation, something believable.

  Mary Anne slammed the lid shut and put it back in the gap, ramming the loose brick in behind it. The simplest excuse came to mind. ‘It’s my Christmas money.’

  ‘You saved all that?’

  She sounded and looked impressed, but Mary Anne fancied the look in her eyes was at odds with her attitude, not so much disbelief, but as though she knew the truth.

  ‘I did,’ said Mary Anne, turning to the pile of washing waiting for the water to heat up, sorting it into whites and coloureds as a way of busying herself and not meeting Lizzie’s eyes.

  Henry never entered the washhouse, and neither did her sons and daughters. As children they’d wrinkled their noses at the smell of soapsuds and steam. It had always been her domain. That’s why she had been able to run her business without any of the family guessing why so many women came and went, presuming perhaps that they merely gossiped and drank tea. Her family didn’t question where the good tablecloths, fine china and excess indulgences in dress and food came from. They were accepting of the good things, living their own lives and leaving their mother to lead hers. Why had Lizzie chosen to come out here now?

  ‘What are you doing out here anyway?’ Mary Anne asked.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

  Lizzie leaned against the boiler; her bright eyes, made brighter because her lashes were so dark, followed her mother’s every move.

  Although Mary Anne only glanced at her, she was aware of something akin to wonder in her daughter’s eyes, but found interpretation quite impossible.

  Lizzie had learned a lot of things since the 3rd of September. For a start she knew more about European politics than she’d ever cared to. She’d also seen another side to her father and brother, even a more selfish one in Daw, her sister. Daw, she’d decided, was under the impression that the world revolved around her or her and John. She’d never noticed before. And then there was Peter. It still irked that he hadn’t told her he was going to Canada. It irked her that he never really took her out, only in the back of his car or to Clancy’s Farm. Why had he never taken her dancing or to the pictures?

  The world was altering, or perhaps it was her that was altering, seeing things differently – like her mother. The realisation that her mother, Mary Anne Randall, wasn’t just her mother but a person in her own right had only recently come to her. She had lived her own life, fallen in love at one time, though it was hard to imagine her parents lusting for each other. It just didn’t seem right.

  We don’t see them as people at all, she thought to herself. To her and her friends, parents were just ‘them’, the woman washing the dishes and the man sitting, smoking and reading a paper, or in her father’s case pretending to read, picking out the words he did know and getting the gist of the news that way. They certainly couldn’t see them doing ‘it’, though God knows how they would have come into existence in the first place. Chillingly, so chillingly that she shuddered, it occurred to her that Stanley could be telling the truth, that her father did actually strike her mother. The thought left her feeling quite sick, but the possibility was now undeniable. How much did any of them really know about their parents’ private relationship?

  ‘So what do you want to talk to me about?’

  Mary Anne made a great show of folding the dirty sheets into neat piles. She didn’t usually do that, but keeping busy was better than meeting the quizzical look in Lizzie’s eyes. She couldn’t recall Lizzie ever looking at her like that before. It made her feel like a child who’s been caught with stolen chocolate around her mouth. In response to the thought, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  ‘I don’t quite know where to start,’ said Lizzie, dropping her eyes to look sheepishly down at her toes as she wriggled them
against her fleecy-lined boots.

  Following Stanley’s outburst, she had watched her parents more closely during the past few days and what she’d seen had surprised her. Her father’s nostrils had flared and his eyes hardened when her mother dared to disagree with him. On one occasion, she’d seen her mother passing Daw ten shillings so she could buy herself something nice to wear. John was coming home for Christmas and Daw was frantic with excitement; she’d always been slightly vulnerable, a little anxious, not like Lizzie who had a tendency to go where angels fear to tread.

  ‘That’s it! Go and spend my hard-earned cash. Housekeeping money don’t grow on trees, you know.’

  Her father had said it jokingly, but a nerve had pulsed beneath one eye and his jaw had turned as stiff as cardboard, his eyes glaring with contemptuous anger, and that anger directed at her mother. The experience had alarmed her. She’d never seen him rise to anger, as he had with Henry. This war, she thought grimly, it’s all down to this war. It’s going to change all of us.

  Alone in the room she shared with Daw, she’d asked herself whether she had imagined it; was there really more to her father than met the eye, or had Stanley been dreaming?

  Her question had been answered later that evening. Henry and Daw had gone out and Stanley was asleep when she passed the kitchen on her way to the outside lavatory. Only her parents remained.

  Unseen, and feeling slightly guilty, she had watched and listened.

  Her father’s voice was low and rumbling and he was hovering over her mother as she cleared the dishes away, the front of his body almost pressed against hers. She couldn’t hear what he was saying and didn’t see him strike her, and yet he’d seemed intimidating.

  ‘The beginning tends to be a good place.’

  Her mother’s voice brought her back to the present.

  Lizzie sucked in her bottom lip, her dark lashes brushing her cheek as she lowered her eyes, searching for the right words to say, words that made sense.

  ‘You and Dad; are you happy?’

  Mary Anne stopped what she was doing. Her laugh was forced and short. ‘Now there’s a question.’

  ‘Are you?’

  Mary Anne covered her confusion with a concerted attack on Harry’s dirty shirts. Regardless of the fact that he worked in the tobacco factory, he insisted on a clean shirt every day.

  ‘We’re no different than anyone else.’

  ‘Our Stanley seems to think so. He said he saw Dad …’ She paused, her mouth turning dry as her mind swiftly analysed the outcome of this. ‘He said Dad hits you.’

  Mary Anne felt her whole body stiffening, like the proverbial pillar of salt. Her poor boy! Her poor boy! She should have known. She had known, but had failed to face the problem. She vowed to make sure he heard no more of his father’s tantrums – though quite how …

  ‘Our Stanley?’ She blurted the words, not wanting to confront her own unease. Disbelief formed a better shield. She stared at Lizzie, her hands flopped on the pile of shirts.

  Lizzie saw the look in her mother’s eyes and it chilled her to the bone. ‘It’s true,’ she said slowly. ‘Don’t deny it, Ma. I can see it in your eyes.’

  The body that had felt like a salt pillar now turned fluid. Mary Anne lowered her eyes and shook her head. ‘You don’t understand.’

  Lizzie’s frown deepened and she folded her arms. Accusations could make one feel quite triumphant; but this wasn’t quite that, thought Lizzie. ‘Why do you protect him?’

  Mary Anne thought hard how to smooth over this lump in her life. She couldn’t think of anything and consequently turned defensive.

  ‘Now that’s enough of all this! Less of your lip, Lizzie. Just be thankful you have a comfortable home provided for you. I’d never let anything hurt you, you know that. What goes on between me and yer father is not your business.’

  ‘Like your pawnbroking?’

  Mary Anne’s jaw dropped. It was the second time Lizzie had surprised her. Besides being a business, the washhouse was the women’s place, like a club where they talked of their troubles among themselves.

  ‘That’s none of your business either.’

  She attacked the washing with renewed vigour, stuffing it into the boiler though the water was not yet boiling and whites never did so well unless steam was rising. The way Lizzie, her own daughter, smiled and shook her head made Mary Anne feel like a silly little girl.

  ‘I’m warning you!’ said Mary Anne, suds flying from the finger she waved. ‘You’re getting too big for your boots.’

  ‘That’s because I’ve grown out of them. I’m grown up, Ma. I go to work. I’ve …’ She had been about to say that she’d known love, but she wasn’t quite sure she had any more. Her views on that were a bit distorted at the moment, so she took a different path. ‘I know about the business. We all know about it to some extent, but as long as we’re looked after and you’re happy, what does it matter?’

  If Mary Anne had been dumbfounded before, she was doubly so now. ‘You know about it?’

  ‘Of course we do – well, me and Harry anyway. We added up all the things we have including Dad’s wages and ours, and found the figures didn’t add up. So we sneaked out here, found your little book and made a few enquiries. John hinted at it the last time he was home. Thanks to you our Daw’s got a whopping great ring on her finger.’

  ‘And she knows too?’

  Lizzie folded her arms and shook her head. ‘Not Daw and not our Dad either.’

  Mary Anne was tempted to ask why the two of them had never let on.

  Reading her mind, Lizzie tilted her head to one side. ‘Isn’t it obvious? Me and Harry, and not forgetting our Stanley, are like you. We notice things. Dad and Daw don’t. They do the things they want to do and most everything else goes over their heads. As long as they get what they want, that’s it. They can’t help it. It’s just the way they are.’

  Lizzie waited for her mother to respond, to unload at least some of her worries about her father. She dared to say what was on her mind. ‘Does he only hit you when he’s drunk?’

  It might have been the child growing in her stomach, or it might just have been shock, because Mary Anne felt something tighten deep inside, as though she’d been kicked. All her life she had doted on her children, determined to give them a happy childhood and never, ever to expose them to the violence that existed deep in her husband’s soul.

  If only they hadn’t grown up, but even so, they were still her children. She still deserved their respect. With that in mind she resolved not to let this go any further.

  ‘Children should be seen and not heard,’ she snapped.

  Lizzie protested, ‘Ma! I’m not a child.’

  Mary Anne eyed Lizzie up and down. Her expression was stiff and guarded, but she saw the same hair and eyes as her own, the same girl likely to fall in love as she had, perhaps get in trouble like she had and being handed a way out that might turn out less than happy.

  ‘Yes. You’ve grown up all right. I can see that,’ she said regretfully, then turned defiant again. ‘Though you don’t always act like it,’ she snapped, turning sharply back to her washing. ‘Sometimes you act like a silly girl.’

  Lizzie felt her face reddening. She knew exactly where this was going.

  ‘I’m old enough to make my own choices, Ma.’

  ‘Peter Selwyn is not for you.’

  Feeling slighted and immature, Lizzie fidgeted before recovering her nerve. ‘Hardly matters at the moment. He’s in Canada. And Mrs Selwyn is talking about going to stay with her sister in Bournemouth. That was why I was thinking of joining the Wrens.’

  ‘Well, you haven’t done it yet, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  It had not been Lizzie’s intention to turn the spotlight on herself. Despite her recent reservations, her passion for Peter Selwyn still gnawed at her insides. Off and on, she missed him and although she knew her interest would not be welcome, she had asked Mrs Selwyn when he was likely to get leave.

>   Mrs Selwyn had kept her glassy eyes fixed on the flowers she was arranging in a vase. Her voice had been as cold as glass, each word like a sliver of steel expressed through tightly clenched teeth.

  ‘That is for his mother to know and not every nobody with whom he happens to have a passing acquaintance. After all, careless talk costs lives, as it says on the poster.’

  Mrs Selwyn had left Lizzie in no doubt that she disapproved of her showing too much interest in her son.

  ‘You are a nobody,’ Lizzie had muttered while polishing the dining table with big, sweeping movements aggravated by anger rather than an overwhelming need to see her face in it.

  It was also clear that his mother would disapprove of them marrying.

  Peter had never mentioned marriage – not in so many words. Lizzie realised she’d been guilty of reading the possibility into the honeyed voice Peter had poured into her ear, while his hands explored her flesh, and her body had burned with longing.

  It was a strange coincidence the following morning to find Mrs Selwyn was sitting at the breakfast table, reading a letter. She looked up beaming the moment Lizzie entered the room.

  ‘Elizabeth! I have received a letter this morning from my darling Peter. Isn’t that wonderful?’ To Lizzie’s surprise, she passed it to her. ‘You may read it if you wish. After all, although not a member of the family, you are a member of this household.’

  Crockery was in danger of being rattled to pieces as she put the tray down on the dining table.

  Too surprised to speak, she took the letter, her eyes swiftly scanning the words, eating them line by line.

  The letter gave details of what he was doing and hinted at where he was ‘on-board ship somewhere in the Atlantic’. The letter was far less eloquent than the one Patrick Kelly had sent her, but she told herself it didn’t matter. All she wanted to know was whether he had mentioned her.

  At last it said,

  Give my best regards to Elizabeth, and tell her to keep an eye on those butchers or they’ll short change her and she’ll have to do extra errands.