by Marie Joseph
‘Yes, who is it?’
The voice was flat and disinterested. Christine took a deep breath.
‘Mrs Barnes?’
‘Yes?’
‘This is Christine Myerscough.’ Christine heard the sharp intake of breath, then went on bravely: ‘I’m in Springcroft Nursing Home.’ She wetted her dry lips. ‘I’m speaking from there. Can I speak to Sally, please?’
There was a moment’s silence. The same nurse put her head round the door only to be waved impatiently away. ‘Are you there, Mrs Barnes?’
‘Aye, I’m here.’ Josie found she was gripping the receiver so hard that her knuckles ached. ‘Sally’s at work, but even if she was here she couldn’t talk on the telephone.’
Christine frowned. Oh, my God! She had forgotten Sally Barnes was deaf, and in her agitated state she had forgotten it was the middle of the afternoon when someone like Sally Barnes was sure to be at work, anyway. She felt the strength draining from her.
‘It’s Saturday tomorrow. Do you think Sally would come and see me?’ Every pore in Christine’s body seemed to be oozing sweat. The binder round her swollen breasts tightened like a tourniquet. She could feel the milk seeping through. ‘It’s terribly important, Mrs Barnes. I have something to tell her. Please, Mrs Barnes.’
Josie held the receiver away from her ear and glanced at it with distaste. This was the girl who had broken her son’s heart. This boss’s daughter with her lah-de-dah voice who had chucked her son for an officer stationed somewhere safe in England, so she’d heard. A chinless wonder who would come back as a director in his father’s firm, while John – Josie’s lovely laughing son – was buried somewhere out there, with sand blowing over his grave. If they had found enough of him to put in a grave. Josie felt anger suffuse her face with a hot wave of passion. The pent-up bitterness in her exploded. Her grief came up, choking her throat and welling into her eyes. But for this girl, her John would never have volunteered for the commandos. He wouldn’t. He loved life too much to do a thing like that. ‘I’ll come back, Mum,’ he had promised in that last phone call. ‘I’m only going where I’m going to get my knees brown. Anyway, I’ll be a lot safer riding a camel than that motor-bike you used to worry about so much.’
‘Are you still there, Mrs Barnes?’
Josie shivered as the high voice with its cut-glass accent brought her back from that imagined far-off country where the sun shone down from a sky hazy with dust, with flak guns mounted on half-tracks, and where British soldiers dived for their slit trenches as German tanks rumbled towards them over the spreading sand. She had seen it all on the newsreel at the pictures only the week before when Stanley had persuaded her to go to be taken out of herself. And then she had had to be helped from the cinema, leaning on him as if she were ill, because never in the most horrendous of her nightmares could she have imagined it to be as terrible as it was.
‘You’ll tell Sally then, will you?’ Christine’s voice was higher still now, with a hysteria that Josie was in no condition to recognize.
Gripping the receiver till her knuckles paled, she shouted into it, the Josie she had once been, triumphantly alive for a fleeting moment.
‘Piss off!’ she shouted, then collapsed sobbing into the nearest chair.
When they sent for Captain Myerscough and asked him whether he would mind returning at once to see his wife as she was in an emotionally disturbed state, Nigel put down the whisky he was drinking with his father-in-law and uncurled himself slowly from the low chair.
‘It’s nothing to worry about.’ He trundled to the big front door of the house set high on a wooded hill, Amos Duckworth following behind, his long face anxious beneath his thick greying hair. ‘Something to do with hormones after a birth, they said. I’ll be back as soon as she’s calmed down.’ He ran lightly down the steps to where his blob of a sports car crouched on the gravel like an angry red beetle. ‘You know Christine.’
Amos waited until the car, filled with black-market petrol, zoomed down the drive, Nigel with his gauntlet-gloved hands on the wheel, driving it as if he were on the last lap of the Monte Carlo Rally. Then he went inside and closed the door.
‘That baby was a mistake,’ he muttered to himself, pouring another whisky. ‘And I don’t mean its conception. I mean in being born at all.’ He took a long swig of the amber liquid. ‘And you’re an unnatural grandfather, Amos Duckworth, because your feelings haven’t been right about it from the start.’ He drained the glass then glanced at its emptiness in surprise. ‘Give our Christine a doll she didn’t want as a child and she’d chuck it right back at you. Give her owt she didn’t want and her reaction was always the same.’ Pushing himself out of the well-padded chair he made a wavy bee-line for the whisky decanter again – a bewildered man who had only wanted to give his only child the best of everything, laughing at her tantrums and easing her out of her sulks with gifts he could well afford.
The whisky missed the glass and dribbled over his white shirt cuff. He mumbled to himself, a habit he’d always had when troubled: ‘Amos, there’s something in this baby set-up that doesn’t quite add up. Not in my book it doesn’t.’
Nigel, roaring down the almost deserted road on his way back to the nursing home, was equally flummoxed. He frowned. The baby had come at a most awkward time. Stationed in the West Country, he saw the war as a game played round a table, with the officers winning all the tricks and the lesser ranks losing and cheating when one’s back was turned. His public school background had turned him into a good leader, and if only Christine could have stayed on with him she would have been reasonably happy. His pals had gone a bundle over her, and damn it, they could have gone on having a whale of a time together. She didn’t mind lazing about doing nothing for most of the time. She liked doing nothing, for Pete’s sake. And now she’d have to stay up north with the baby, and he’d miss her. He’d miss her like hell.
He turned a corner on two wheels. They were okay, him and Christine. Or had been, till he slipped up. Then for a while she’d gone all funny on him. Nigel slapped the wheel hard. He’d always seen that she was okay, so what the hell had gone wrong? There had only been one weekend when it could have happened, and he could have sworn she’d be all right. He remembered reading once that the only safe form of birth control was total abstinence. He snorted. Whoever the geezer was who’d said that, could say it again!
The little red car swung into the drive and drew up in front of the nursing home in a spatter of gravel.
Sister Kelly had meant to have another word with Captain Myerscough. His wife had interrupted the other mothers at their six o’clock feed. Sobbing and wailing and refusing even to try to have her bowels moved.
‘My God!’ she’d screamed. ‘Take the bloody thing away! It’s like sitting on an iceberg!’ And poor little Nurse Tam-worth had rushed from Mrs Myerscough’s room vowing she wasn’t going to stay and be clocked one with a bedpan.
But for the twenty minutes the captain was closeted with his wife, Sister Kelly had been kept busy dealing with a labour that looked as if it was going to end up as an emergency caesarian. So all she saw of Nigel was his back as he strode down the corridor, passing the nursery without even a cursory glance.
‘Heaven preserve me from mard women!’ the sister grumbled, her crêpe-soled shoes making angry slapping noises as she marched into Christine’s room, her back ramrod straight and the light of battle in her eyes.
Mrs Myerscough had another visitor later that evening. A small girl who looked as if she had come in straight from work in slacks, raincoat and a bunch of dark curls sticking out from the front of her turbanned head.
‘I never thought your mother would pass on my message.’ Christine, calmed and settled with a dose of Sister Kelly’s tranquillizing medicine, was sitting up in bed, hands folded over the neatly turned-down sheet.
‘She thought better of it.’ Sally stood at the foot of the high narrow bed. ‘I came straight here.’ She looked at Christine apprehensively, then spoke qu
ickly. ‘She sort of blames you for John joining the commandos like he did. She is convinced he would still be alive if he hadn’t done that.’
‘Oh, my God!’ Christine began to gather the sheet between her fingers, pleating it like a fan. ‘Oh, my God!’
Christine Myerscough, née Duckworth, looked a sorry sight. Used to staring frequently and admiringly into mirrors, it was obvious to Sally that she had not taken a long hard look at herself for a long time. If she had done so she would have screamed in dismay.
The auburn hair hung lank round hollowed cheeks. Anguish stared from eyes dulled with despair, and her mouth, innocent of lipstick, was compressed into a thin hard line.
She said softly: ‘I can’t take the baby home, Sally.’ If Sally could have heard, the voice would have sounded as if it came as an echo, disembodied, unreal.
‘Why can’t you take him home, Christine?’ There was a kindness in Sally’s eyes as she watched the other girl carefully, a kindness tempered with concern. Sally waited. ‘I know what you are trying to tell me, Christine. I think I guessed a long time ago, but you have to tell me yourself. Okay?’
‘You see,’ Christine said, in the strange far-away voice, ‘we decided we didn’t want children, Nigel and me. I have no maternal feelings whatsoever, and if that makes me into a freak, then that’s what I am.’ She turned her head away.
‘Please look at me when you speak,’ Sally said in her flat little voice. ‘I can’t lip-read you if you don’t.’
As obedient as a hand-controlled puppet, Christine turned her head back again.
‘I know my marriage would go to pot if a baby started mucking things up. It must sound awful to you but I’ve had a long time to think about it all. Nigel deserves better than a cuckolding, even though he’d have made a rotten father.’ She went on almost absently. ‘We are both basically bone-idle, selfish and altogether rotten, I suppose. I want to join Nigel again down in Cornwall as soon as they let me out of this mausoleum, and with any luck we can whoop it up together till the war’s over.’ She nodded. ‘If there should be any rumours about going abroad, Nigel’s father is all ready to step in. His mill is making uniforms for the Services, you see, and with him being on more than nodding terms with a Cabinet Minister who shall be nameless, Nigel could be out at a stroke of a pen. Essential war work. Don’t look at me like that, Sally. I told you, we’re a rotten lot.’ She said abruptly: ‘The baby is Johnnie’s. I’ve told Nigel.’
There! It was said, and the enormous relief brought the tears up from where they’d been frozen for a long time. Christine let them come in great gulping sobs, making no attempt to wipe them away.
‘You guessed, didn’t you?’ Christine raised her head.
‘And what did your husband say?’
‘What I thought he’d say.’ Christine groped underneath her pillow for a handkerchief. ‘He blew his top at first, then when I told him it was just the once, and that I was drunk, and that your brother was on embarkation leave, he calmed down.’
‘And were you drunk?’
‘No.’ Forgetting the stitches, Christine moved restlessly then moaned. ‘No, we were both quite sober.’ She put the handkerchief to her face, remembering the night when the bombs were falling, when nothing had mattered but the two of them, holding each other tight, whispering words of love, clinging, promising, totally abandoned to a passion that had shattered with its intensity. ‘You won’t believe this, but I truly loved Johnnie. Until he went away, and I found out I was pregnant. I was going to tell Nigel when he came on leave. Then I started to think. Don’t ask me why – something to do with me imagining a life with your brother, having more babies and making-do-and-mending, I suppose. Having the baby here, with him in the Middle East – oh, God, I couldn’t face it. It was much easier all round, for everyone concerned, for me to marry Nigel and let him think it was his.’
‘And could it be? Christine? Could it possibly be?’
‘No, not a chance. I’d had a period after Nigel.’ Christine broke out into fresh sobs. ‘When I met you that day and you told me Johnnie had been killed, I wanted to die. Then I thought I’d done the right thing, but I hadn’t. The baby would remind me every day of its life what an awful muddle I’d got myself into. It would remind me of Johnnie, and oh, God, I daren’t be reminded of him! I’ve forgotten him, I have to forget him, can’t you see? I can’t see his face any more, nor remember his voice. And that is how it’s got to be. For me to go on being rotten, which is the only way I know, I can’t be reminded of your brother. Ever!’
Sally moved round the bed to stand looking down at Christine’s bowed head. A growing sense of excitement was moving inside her. She restrained herself from putting out a hand to touch Christine. What had to be said had to be said calmly and without emotion clouding her words.
‘What about your parents? It’s their grandchild, Christine.’
The bowed head jerked up. ‘Nigel will have told them by now, and they … oh my God, they’re in their late fifties, for crying out loud! Mummy’s not likely to give up a single one of her blasted committees to look after my little by-blow. She’s the top brass in the Guides, didn’t you know, and if it’s not Inner Wheel it’s VAD on her mind. I can just see her waking in the night to change a shitty nappy.’
‘Nigel’s parents?’ Sally’s voice, no longer under her normal stringent control, came out as a croak.
‘Separated.’ Christine blew her nose. ‘Oh, it’s not official. They still live under the same roof, believe it or not, but they go their separate ways. Mrs Myerscough told me straight out what a fool I’d been when I told her I was pregnant. And that was when she thought the baby was her son’s. Now that she knows it’s a little bastard she’ll be even more delighted than ever.’
‘So …?’ Sally said, in a tone so harsh that had she been able to hear it it would have horrified her.
‘So …’ Christine said, then looked away from the fierce little face beneath the blue turban, the strength suddenly ebbing from her as if it had been siphoned off by Sister Kelly’s hypodermic needle. ‘Oh, God, I’m tired.’
‘May I see the Myerscough baby, please?’ Sally stopped a nurse outside the nursery. ‘I know it’s on the late side, but may I?’
‘Are you a relative?’ The nurse was on her way to supper but something in the uneven lilt of Sally’s voice prevented her from quoting the rules and giving a blank refusal.
‘I’m his auntie,’ Sally said proudly.
‘We’re having him!’ Josie gripped Stanley’s arm hard. ‘They don’t want him and we do! You heard what Sally said.’
Stanley prized his wife’s fingers gently away from his wrist. ‘Steady on, love. It isn’t as clear-cut as that.’ He stroked his moustache, chewing the situation over, considering, worriting, wanting time to think. ‘Suppose Sally here has got the wrong end of the stick? Suppose Christine changes her mind? It won’t be the first time a girl has offered her baby for adoption then gone back on it.’ He chewed on nothing for a long moment. ‘Besides, are you sure you want to start with a baby at your age?’
Winter sleet dashed against the blacked-out window. Exasperation gripped Josie in a vice. ‘Hell’s bells and buckets of blood, Stanley Barnes! What do you mean, at my age? I’m young enough to have a baby of my own!’ She moved away from him abruptly, making for the door. ‘I’m going to ring old Amos Duckworth up and tell him we’re coming round. Then first thing in the morning I’m going to see my grandson! Our John’s baby. Oh, stop standing there like a fart trapped in a bottle! Just for once do something decisive. There’s nobody having that little lad but me! I’m his grandma, and you’re his grandpa, you great soft ha’porth!’
‘Stop it, woman!’ Stanley followed her into the hall. ‘Sleep on it, for God’s sake! The Duckworths have enough to chew on tonight without us turning up uninvited.’
As Josie picked up the telephone, he turned to Sally standing quietly by the fire. It occurred to him suddenly that if this wild scheme came to fruition
it could impose the kind of solidarity on his family that had been missing for a long time. He had seen Josie sliding ever further into a depression he could do nothing to prevent, and now, with Sally’s startling news visibly shaking Josie out of her morass of frustration and despair, it was as though the wife he loved had been restored to him, vibrantly alive once again.
Wordlessly he held out both hands to Sally, palms upward as if in supplication.
‘Now who’s set the cat among the pigeons?’ the gesture said.
Sally saw them off at the door, heads bent underneath a shared umbrella; and going back inside she said a fervent prayer over a covered plate of spam and potatoes keeping warm atop a pan of gently boiling water.
She asked God to let it work out right, and begged His forgiveness for interceding on His behalf. When her hunger was satisfied and a little warmth had seeped back into her bones, she took a pad of paper and a fountain pen out of the sideboard drawer and began a long letter to Lee.
‘You are not going to believe this,’ she wrote, oblivious to the rain now dashing against the window pane in a torrent of fury.
Ten
‘STANLEY BARNES! IT’S A wonder you don’t have aerials growing out of your ear-holes, the time you spend with your head in that flamin’ speaker!’
Because Josie spoke with a nappy pin clenched between her teeth, Sally failed to catch the words, but by the way her father wrinkled his nose and smiled she knew the remark had been a teasing one.
The Myerscough baby, soon to be the Barnes’s baby once all the papers had been signed and red tape sorted out, lay on his back on Josie’s knee. His mottled legs were waving and thrashing about, and he was staring up at her with what, to the besotted, could have been interpreted as a cross-eyed devotion.
‘The first refugees from Singapore have begun to arrive over here.’ Stanley spoke directly to Sally, accepting with equanimity that, for the moment, powdering his little grandson’s bottom occupied all his wife’s attention. ‘From the reports it sounds like our lot were playing bridge and tennis and dancing the nights away right till the Japs landed.’ He tut-tutted his disapproval. ‘We had our guns pointing out to sea, but the little yellow men came in overland.’ With obvious reluctance he switched the wireless off. ‘Makes you sick to think of the Union Jack being pulled down for the Rising Sun flag. Java will be the next, mark my words.’ He reached for the comfort of his pipe. ‘They’re right bastards, those Japs. A chap at the Post said he’d heard they were bayoneting our soldiers in Hong Kong then leaving them to lie on the ground unburied.’