An East End Girl

by Maggie Ford

  Carefully, he lay on top of her. The warmth of his flesh touching her thighs made her arch convulsively towards him and he moved into her with slow rhythmic pulses, bringing them together. Not a word had been said. Words would have broken the mystery of it, the very act of his love was enough.

  When it was over, and they lay in each other’s arms on his coat, Cissy felt she had never known such contentment. He hadn’t brought her to any raging climax, yet it had been a coupling like no other she had known, sweet and gentle and caring. That was Eddie. She felt at this moment that should he never bring her to her climax, it would still be enough that he make love to her for the rest of their lives. Better than the mad thrashing of limbs, the panting for even more heights of orgasmic excitement that she’d experienced with Langley Makepeace, this was all she would ever want.

  Slowly she sat up, it dawning on her that Eddie still hadn’t asked her to her face if she would marry him, her only knowledge of it had come through hearing him express it to others – his mother, her father – a second-hand proposal. The thought prompted a small unexpected stab of resentment, unwarranted, she knew, because if he hadn’t loved her he’d never have made love to her, yet rancour was there nevertheless.

  At her movement he too sat up, his brown eyes full of contentment. For a moment longer they gazed into hers, but grew faintly bewildered seeing something there he could not define. Then as he slowly read the message they held, the bewilderment cleared and he smiled.

  ‘Cissy, there’s something I haven’t done,’ he said quietly, his low voice muffled by the dingy little office. ‘I’ve not asked you properly if you would marry me. Would you like to?’

  For a moment she didn’t reply, then the inanity of the request hit her. What a time to ask. She felt laughter bubble up, bursting out in peal after peal of convulsive joy. Seconds later he too had joined in, the office ringing to their united laughter. How she loved this man to whom she clung, laughing. Why had she not realised it years ago?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  She still hadn’t told Eddie about her daughter. She shuddered to think how he’d take it. How did one start on a thing like that? He should have been told the very day they met, but it hadn’t seemed appropriate then. It stood to reason, though, that the longer the delay the harder it would be. He would have to know sometime rather than find out when Daisy came over to the wedding, for she had to ask Daisy.

  They still corresponded regularly and frequently, Daisy with all Noelle’s recent doings, and she with endless accounts of Eddie and the wedding arrangements.

  Oddly enough, now that she had Eddie to think about, fretting for Noelle had grown considerably less. Sometimes she’d forget about her for days on end and then feel uncomfortably guilty that she had, that as a mother she ought to be pining for her return constantly. She made an effort to retain that longing, even welcoming that old prickle of jealousy when Daisy wrote ever more possessively about Noelle.

  Of course Eddie must be told. But the weeks were going by, the wedding was only a month away – August – at her own request a registry office affair with which Eddie was happy, not being particularly given to religion. He hadn’t been inside a church for years other than for the odd friend’s wedding and more recently his father’s funeral which had shaken him anyway, enough that he wouldn’t be disposed to reawakening the memory by marrying in church.

  It was all arranged. For their honeymoon they’d be going down to Bournemouth for a couple of days – all they could afford. There was his business and her shop to consider. For the time being they’d have her rented little flat, his mother stoically accepting the arrangement which would leave her entirely on her own. He had promised to pop in every day for half an hour, hoping that would help a little to ease the wrench of his leaving, but he had his own life to lead, his own marriage to care for. Cissy felt sad for her, the poignant offer of part of her two-bedroomed home for the newly-weds had to be refused for there would be only the one room for them and they wouldn’t have their privacy. Cissy needed to be near her shop to open each morning, and though Eddie would have to go off to his office, there was no sense in them both going off in different directions when she was already there above her shop. So Mrs Bennett would have to let her son go and face up to being alone as best she could. Cissy steeled herself against too much pity in the light that she too had been forced into loneliness in the past and at this very moment did not have her child with her – worse still, could not even talk about her, as yet.

  The brief list of guests being made out highlighted that vividly. Daisy and Theodore wouldn’t be overjoyed if she were to leave out their precious little Noelle. She was sure Daisy had begun to look upon her as her very own.

  As time went on, it had become ever more apparent that Daisy, still without a child of her own, was turning more and more to Noelle to take the place of the one she so wanted and still couldn’t have. It could be read between the lines of her every letter.

  Sometimes Cissy wondered if it wouldn’t be better to leave things as they stood. Would it really be kind to any of them for her to demand Noelle back? Eddie, trusting, innocent Eddie, put through the trauma of knowing that there had been a child – a bastard – from her alliance with Langley Makepeace? Did he deserve that, after all that had transpired these last couple of months? Cissy was in particular fear of his reaction, worried that at the last moment she would find herself rejected, alone again, and this time with no one to bale her out. Eddie was her salvation and she loved him so very much, the thought of his walking away from her was something not to be borne.

  They made love on a regular basis now – in the comfort of her flat, away from everyone, as though they were already married. Life was so sweet. Why disrupt it now over a child she hardly knew? Noelle was her own flesh and blood and yet she knew so little, saw so little of her, it was as though that episode in her life had been a dream. After all, she was happy with Eddie and he was innocently unaware of any existing child; Noelle seemed contented with her ‘auntie’, and Daisy was as happy as any loving mother. So why rock the boat?

  Even so, the nagging knowledge persisted that secrets were only in existence to reveal themselves at the most inopportune moment, their sole design to put a spoke in the wheels of happiness.

  Then came a letter from Daisy to make her wonder if she really did need to tell him after all, that it might be as well to let sleeping offpsring lie. Strange, she thought as she read, how circumstances can alter cases.

  Theodore had his arms around his wife, feeling her sobbing resounding right through his narrow chest.

  ‘I didn’t deserve this,’ she sobbed. ‘I’d always hoped.’

  ‘It is not the end of the world, beloved,’ he murmured, his face in her dark tousled hair. ‘Our love will strengthen us and will bring us more closely together to face this sad business.’

  He had tried not to sound complacent or resigned, but Daisy raised her face to his, features contorted with grief. ‘It’s all right for you! You’re a man, you don’t have to suffer the stigma or the ache of knowing you can’t have a child.’

  ‘It is as sorrowful for me as it is for you. All my life have I thought to be a father one day. But now it seems God has decreed otherwise. Who are we to protest against that? Remember, my dear, there is still our Noelle.’

  ‘She’s not our Noelle.’

  He frowned. ‘Ah, sometimes I forget.’

  Tears ran freely down her cheeks. ‘Cissy could easily write one day, out of the blue, asking for her back. She’s getting married soon, and she’s bound to. There’s nothing to stop her. Noelle’s not ours. And soon she won’t even be with us. I don’t think I could bear her not being here. And me unable to have children…Oh, Teddy!’ She dropped her face to his chest again. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do if she writes asking for her back.’

  Theodore thought for a moment, one slim hand patting his wife’s shaking shoulders almost in rhythm with his thoughts. ‘There are good doctors in Germany.
I have never felt trust in those here. They have aloofness with foreigners that I have my doubts of them. I should feel more comfortable with those in my own country who I am sure would go into greater investigation with your case. And also I have a desire to return to my homeland. With the financial depression we are having, I do not feel as well as I should feel – not so alert in my dealings. I am certain that my health is a little ailing and I have a great enticement to see my father’s grave before it is too late.’

  Now Daisy lifted her head to stare up at him in alarm. She even moved back from him for a better look. It was late in the evening. He had not long come home from his office and she had noticed then how strained he looked. Little Noelle had been crying as he entered, the apartment ringing to her yells as Daisy rocked her. Three years old and wanting to run everywhere instead of walk, she had caught her temple painfully on the corner of the heavy walnut dining table. Theodore had let his briefcase fall to the ground as he hurried to help console her, rubbing at the hurt place until her crying had been reduced to quiet intermittent sobs. Now with her tucked safely in her bed after a drink of warm milk, having refused to eat anything, their own supper still to be dished up, he looked tired and, dare she say, ill.

  For a long time his struggle against the times had been slowly defeating him. He had not been made poor by any means. Companies still needed to borrow money. But they were more discerning, tetchy, baulking against the customary pound of flesh all financiers required as of right, where once they would have paid up without the bat of an accountant’s eyelid. It all served to press down upon him.

  ‘See your father’s grave?’ she echoed fearfully. ‘What for? There’s nothing wrong with you, is there?’

  ‘I am just tired, mein liebling. Perhaps in Germany I will relax.’

  ‘The Depression’s as bad there as it is anywhere. Worse. Germany’s in a terrible state. It’s got the worst unemployment of anywhere.’

  ‘We shall not go immediately.’ He smiled. ‘By next year the world will have recovered a little and my country will see better times.’

  He leaned towards her. ‘I should very much like to go home, Daisy. I am becoming so homesick of late. You will not be disappointed with my homeland. She is beautiful. Her people are good, clean and precise in all they do, self-respecting and generous, are not of such easy nonchalance as here. You will like them, I am sure. The people are very…like the British in manner. You will feel at home, I know.’

  She was beginning to get over the initial shock of the news that the hospital had given her this afternoon following a lengthy, sometimes delayed series of tests on her continued inability to conceive. Drying her tears she decided that hospitals were not always right. This one’s approach to her problem had been, to say the least, lackadaisical. She would bide her time, and when she and Teddy eventually went to live in Germany, have more tests, proper tests done, and maybe by next year…

  But if they too found her unable to have children, she had Noelle, who was now like her own child. She prayed constantly that now Cissy had someone else to love and care for, she might let her stay here. More than likely Cissy would have children from her marriage, so what would she want with a love child who only held memories for her of a man who had so cruelly let her down?

  Feeling slightly better and more optimistic, Daisy sat down at the lovely bureau in their beautiful bedroom and wrote to Cissy on the declining state of their finances, of Teddy’s fancy to go to Germany, of the sorry news so far about her failure to conceive and ending with a request that she continue to look after Noelle for a while longer; being that the wedding was so near, Noelle might disrupt the arrangements.

  Reading it, Cissy felt fate had taken a hand, and that perhaps it wouldn’t really be the wisest thing to tell Eddie about her child yet.

  ‘I think you ought to let bygones be bygones, Charlie.’

  Doris stood over her husband, the dress she had got from a stall in Petticoat Lane this Sunday morning, a nice pink and white print, dangling from her hand after May had altered it for her.

  She, May and Cissy had been on a shopping spree for wedding stuff yesterday and had really scoured the lane, each of them pleased with what they’d come home with. May, as Cissy’s bridesmaid, had found something suitable in yellow taffeta in one of the nicer Jewish shops. Cissy had found a lovely wedding dress in the same shop, white satin with a small cape, and had gone somewhere else for her tiny headdress of wax orange blossom and short veil.

  ‘She’s always had good taste,’ Doris observed, after she’d departed to her flat. ‘She and Eddie will make a lovely couple next Saturday.’

  But Charlie didn’t share her sentiments. ‘Got a cheek, marrying in white. What’s virgin about ’er, I ask yer, after what she’s done?’

  With Eddie claiming Cissy for his wife, he’d had to form a reluctant truce. Not much he could do about it really, but he felt deep inside that he could never truly forgive her for what she’d done even if Eddie had; less, knowing what he and Doris did, Doris’d sworn him to secrecy. ‘It’s her business and no one else’s,’ she had said firmly. ‘If she wants to tell ’im about the baby, then it’s for ’er and not us to let ’im know. She’ll do it when she thinks the time’s ripe.’

  ‘She ain’t being fair to ’im,’ Charlie had complained, rightly so, he felt. ‘I won’t let the cat out of the bag, but when ’e does find out, I wouldn’t want ter be in ’er shoes. Too nice a bloke to ’ave the wool pulled over ’is eyes. But you watch out, my gel, like all nice quiet blokes, there can be an ’idden temper underneath.’

  ‘Then you leave ’is ’idden temper to ’im,’ was all she said as she went off to try on her altered dress.

  Cissy’s secret was indeed known only to her parents and they had kept it well. They hadn’t even told May or Bobby, and for that she was profoundly grateful to them both – more than they would ever realise, more than words could ever say.

  Her only concern was Daisy and Theodore. How would they introduce Noelle? If they brought her, that was. She had a feeling that Daisy would do the right thing by her, leave the child behind in the care of a hired nurse, which they still seemed able to afford despite Daisy’s bemoaning her lot these days.

  From the old longing to see her daughter, Cissy now found herself hoping they wouldn’t bring her. One thing she knew, she could trust Daisy implicitly to keep her secret. Her whole world now revolving around Eddie she surprised even herself that her motherly love could all but disappear. If that was the case, arrangements could be made for Daisy to keep her, foster her, perhaps one day adopt her. Eddie may never need to know and her dread of the consequences of his knowing began to fade. Daisy would be over the moon, she was sure.

  The wedding day, from seeming so long away in May, had galloped up to them with such increasing speed that it set Cissy into a panic that she wouldn’t have everything ready for the day. Two days to go, the food for the wedding breakfast prepared by both mothers, Eddie footing the bill for what had been bought, the reception to be held in his office of all places, the largest accommodation for two dozen people. His mother’s home wasn’t half big enough, and her father, although having come to terms with her, still wasn’t disposed to those terms enough to allow his house to be invaded by her wedding guests.

  *

  ‘How does it look?’

  Cissy watched her sister’s critical gaze as she stood in front of the mirror in her parents’ bedroom, another begrudging concession from Dad that she could get married from here.

  He would give her away. She overheard him say to Mum, ‘She didn’t need me giving ’er away last time she left ’ome.’ And her mother’s short shrift. ‘It’s tradition, Charlie, so shut up about it!’

  She wasn’t going to have her eldest daughter’s wedding day spoiled by sour faces. She had forgiven her long ago.

  May regarded the dress, leaning back on her heels where she had been stitching up the slightly drooping sides – cheap dress, Cissy thought with a pang of
wistfulness. Had she married Langley Makepeace, hers would have been the wedding of the year in a gown that was the height of fashion and a string of bridesmaids, a reception to beat all receptions, press photographers from the papers and afterwards a beautiful country house to live in. But she wasn’t marrying Langley Makepeace with his comfortable inheritance. She was marrying Eddie Bennett, with both of them struggling to keep their respective, slowly downward-spiralling businesses from coming to a bump at the bottom if the country didn’t pick up soon. Quickly she shrugged off the vague feeling of bitterness and sudden panic that had gripped her. Eddie loved her and she him.

  ‘It looks a lot better now,’ May was saying. ‘In fact, Cissy, you look a wow. Let’s get your headdress on. We’ve got to be at the registry office in twenty minutes.’

  Twenty minutes. In twenty-five minutes she’d be Mrs Eddie Bennett. It sounded truly wonderful. What was more, she was carrying Eddie’s child, she was sure. She had missed last month’s period and this one was already a week late. But this time she was getting married. That was for certain. In twenty minutes. Cissy’s heart sang with prayers of thanks to a God she hadn’t thought of since praying for help after Langley had thrown money at her and walked out telling her not to be there when he returned.

  If she was pregnant, and there was no reason why she shouldn’t be, she had a gift to give her husband that could match no other.

  The car had returned from dropping the rest of the family at the registry office, this its third trip. Two cars had been out of the question. Dad was unable to pay for a thing for his daughter, so she had put her hand in her own pocket for it. With a last minute prink of her dress and picking up her small shop-bought spray of three creamy roses and a trail of fern, nothing too elaborate or expensive, she came down the stairs. May followed behind in her frilled primose dress and a tiny posy of sweet peas made by an aunt from her own window box. Dad was at the bottom in his best suit – one Cissy faintly recognised with a pang of sadness as being the same that had been hanging in his wardrobe the day she had left home. Out of work, there was no thought of buying another, even for this special day.