I turn over the picture. On the back Dan Lockett has written Summer ’43.
I don’t intend to go to the unveiling of the memorial but in the end I can’t keep away. The ceremony takes place around the village war memorial, beside which –after lengthy debate –the monument commemorating the 429th has been sited. I deliberately arrive a little late so I can stand at the back of the small crowd, unnoticed.
The mayor is giving a speech, welcoming the USAAF veterans back. There are perhaps twenty of them, recognisable by their smart brass-buttoned blazers. I spot Lyle straight away. He’s holding a wreath of paper poppies and his face shows a solemnity in remembrance that I never saw back then. Nancy is standing beside him, wearing a beautiful dark blue coat and an expression of beatific calm, which almost looks like triumph.
The vicar –an earnest youth with a chumminess of manner that would horrify my father –is speaking now. A sharp-edged autumn wind hurls leaves onto the steps of the war memorial and snatches his voice away, tossing back the words sacrifice and loss. Nancy tucks her arm through Lyle’s and bitterness shrivels my insides. What does she know about those things? With her husband and her three fine sons, her six blue-eyed grandchildren. What does she know?
The vicar lifted his hands, palms upturned. ‘Friends, let us share a moment of silence, to remember…’
There is a shuffling of feet and a bowing of heads. I keep my gaze fixed forward and try to make my mind blank, but the memories come anyway. An autumn afternoon, like this one, the light bleeding out of the day too soon. A Sunday –Harvest Festival evensong –the steam in the kitchen oily with the smell of the rabbit my mother skinned for lunch. Details come back in fragments, embedding themselves in my flesh like shards of broken glass. The bitterness of the gin, which made me gag with every mouthful. Condensation running down the walls, the windows smudged to pale squares that shimmered and pulsed before my eyes.
My whole body pulsed like one giant heart. My skin, scarlet, wrinkled and papery like poppy petals. The blood whooshed in my ears so that I never heard the banging on the door and was surprised to see Dan Lockett’s face looming over me through the steam, like something from a disjointed dream. His voice echoed in the empty spaces inside my head, and cool air curled around my body as he lifted me out of the tin bath.
Then I was sick.
The Last Post sounds the end of the silence, but the memory of how he carried me upstairs, slid my nightdress over my head and laid me back against the cool sheet won’t be chased away that easily. He must have tidied up the kitchen, emptying the scalding water out of the bath and getting rid of the gin bottle before coming back up to see if I was alright. It was dark by then. I remember him pulling the blackout before switching on my bedside light.
‘I’ll marry you,’ he said and his eyes were dark and sad in the glow of the lamp.
The men of the 429th begin to place their wreaths against the granite base of the new memorial. With a start I feel someone slide their arm through mine. It’s Nancy. I stiffen and have to stop myself from pulling away. Lyle is the last to lay his wreath and together we watch him stoop, then straighten and salute.
‘He’s a good man,’ Nancy murmurs beside me, so softly that I don’t know if she’s talking to me or herself. The ceremony ends and people begin to circulate, greeting each other in subdued tones. Nancy lets go of my arm but doesn’t move away. I can tell that there’s something she wants to say and I have the strongest feeling that I don’t want to hear it.
‘We’ve had our bad times, Lyle and me. He’s like any man –easily distracted, especially by a tight skirt and a pretty smile. But not a single day passes when I don’t remember how lucky I am to have him.’
I look at her. She seems frailer suddenly. Less assured. The wind pulls at a strand of her ash blonde hair, showing the white at its roots.
‘A lot of men didn’t come back,’ I say neutrally.
‘I’m not stupid, Hope.’ Head bent, she smoothes the soft leather of her gloves over her fingers. ‘You know, when he was over here during the war I used to pray every day that God would send him back to me. I didn’t even ask for him to be in one piece, just so long as he came back.’ She looks up at me. ‘I guess I never thought that the piece that might be missing was his heart.’
The crowd is thinning now as people drift off in the direction of the pub, where there is a fire and a free bar. I close my eyes for a second, wincing at a pain I can’t quite locate, then I take a deep breath. ‘No,’ I say, on an exhalation. ‘He never loved me. I was his distraction from the job, that’s all. His heart was always with you.’
It’s true. In fact, it’s so blindingly obvious as Lyle walks over, his smile freezing at the sight of Nancy and me together, that I feel a little stunned. Lightheaded. He glances at me uneasily as he puts his arm around his wife, as if he is wondering what I’ve told her, trying to calculate how much he has to explain. Nancy gathers herself, her mask of serenity slipping back into place as she looks up at him.
‘It was a moving ceremony, sweetheart. I’m glad we could be here.’
‘Me too, honey.’ Clearly relieved, he gives her a little squeeze. ‘Now, how ’bout we go to the bar and I’ll buy you a pint of English beer?’
‘After everything you told me about it?’ She swats at him affectionately. ‘I’ll pass, thanks. You’ll come, won’t you Hope?’
I feel tired and peculiarly disorientated. I open my mouth to make an excuse when something catches the corner of my eye and makes me look again. Something shifts and slots into place in my head.
‘Sorry, would you excuse me?’ Nancy looks surprised as I embrace her briefly. ‘It was lovely to meet you,’ I say, and I too am surprised because I mean it.
Lyle follows the direction of my gaze and gives a grunt. ‘I recognise that fella…Wasn’t he the guy with the weak heart, lived out by the woods? Damned if I can think of the name…’
But I don’t wait to see if he remembers the man who took the photograph on that summer’s day in 1943. The man who picked up the pieces of me that were left after Lyle went, and offered to be a father to his child.
There was no need in the end. About a week after Dan found me in the bath I woke up with cramps in my stomach and blood on the sheets. I should have been relieved, but I wasn’t. I felt like a murderer. Like I’d lost everything and deserved nothing. Maybe that was why I told Dan he didn’t have to marry me.
‘Dan, wait!’
He is walking away from the square, up the lane past the church. He stops and turns, and his smile is as wistful as the autumn afternoon.
‘You don’t have to tell me to do that, Hope Riley. I’ve been waiting for you for almost fifty years.’
I stop. My chest is tight and the breath burning my throat, but it’s not just from walking too fast to catch him up.
‘Dan, I’ve been so stupid.’ The word spills out of me, like a sob. ‘All these years I stayed here, just in case he came back…’
Like Snow White in her glass coffin, waiting and waiting for Prince Charming to come and bring her back to life, so I waited for Lyle. But it turned out that he wasn’t the Prince after all; just a charming boy a long way from home.
Dan shakes his head, slowly, his eyes full of an emotion I can’t read. I’ve known him for so long, but suddenly I realise I barely know him at all. And I want to. I really want to.
‘And I stayed here in case he didn’t,’ he sighs. ‘But now he has.’
‘Thank God, because now I know. I see…’ My throat feels raw, like I’m getting a cold, and my cheeks are wet. ‘Dan, is it too late?’
The next thing I know he has pulled me into his arms and is holding me, cradling me against his chest, just like he did on that September Sunday so long ago when he called round to bring firewood. The years fall away and the ice in my veins creaks as the blood begins to move again. I can hear his heart, slow and steady against my cheek. Strong. I never did believe that story about the Army turning him down.
We stay like that for a long time. His breath is warm against my hair.
‘It’s never too late,’ he murmurs at last.
Still we don’t move.
We have waited a lifetime. There’s no rush.
How To Get a Pill Into A Cat
Judy Astley
Judy Astley
JUDY ASTLEY’s first novel, Just For The Summer was published in 1990, before which she worked as a dressmaker, illustrator, painter and parent. Her eighteen novels are all published by Transworld and the most recent is In The Summertime, a twenty-years-on follow-up to that first book.
Judy’s specialist areas are family disharmony and family chaos with a mix of love-and-passion and plenty of humour thrown in, ranging across all generations –love isn’t only for the young!
She’s been a regular columnist on magazines and enjoys writing journalism pieces on more or less any subject, usually from a fun viewpoint. She lives in London and Cornwall, loves plants, books, hot sun and rock music, preferably all at once. She would claim that being excessively curious about other people’s lives and listening into the conversations of strangers is essential in her line of work.
Judy’s website is at www.judyastley.com
How To Get A Pill Into A Cat
It’s not the best start to a neighbourly relationship is it, when the first words you hear on the doorstep of the man who’s just moved in next door are, ‘Hello! So you’re the other cat-lady.’
Catlady? Oh terrific. Not a stereotype at all then. Just because I don’t have a resident man on my premises but do have a cat (and just one old dozy mog, not twenty pampered furry beasts), it doesn’t make me a demented Cat Woman.
I try but fail to regain my cheery-neighbour smile. ‘I have a cat, yes,’ I tell him, handing over my welcome-to-the-street cake and sensing I’m looking as idiotically po-faced as I feel. We exchange a few remarks about parking permits, wheelie bins and over-the-road’s amazing monkey puzzle tree and I go home to have a bit of a seethe.
I don’t have to guess how he already knows about me. It’s obvious that Polly, who lives on the other side of him, has already raced round and introduced herself and given him all the street info. Trust her to get in first, I think, suddenly embarrassed for my humble, and frankly a bit lopsided, Victoria sandwich. She’d have worn a vat of lipgloss and brought champagne. But then she was young and swishily glamorous whereas I was a perpetually flustered divorcée with earth under my fingernails –hazard of working at the plant nursery –and a teenage daughter stressing over exams and boys. My cat was not some man/baby substitute, in fact, poor Boris hardly got a look-in some days. Thank goodness for dry cat food. At least he was always sure there was a meal in his bowl, even though Polly’s shameless Burmese called Princess –I ask you –often ran in through our back door like she owned the place and gobbled down his lunch.
‘Oh Mum, like chill?’ Cassie said, an hour later over supper when I was still grumping about the perceived image of lone women of a certain age. ‘He’s probably well butters and keeps cages full of minging ferrets in his shed.’
I don’t answer that. OK it was a flying visit but I did manage to take in that next-door Nick isn’t remotely ‘well butters’ as Cassie and her teenage mates so charmingly put it. He’s quite the opposite actually: an attractive arty-looking grey-eyed sort with frondy blond hair like a slightly past it surfer. He is also without an on-site partner (information from Polly who got it via the estate agent the minute the keys were handed over). I couldn’t see any obvious evidence of massed smelly pets either but I had seen a gorgeous brass bed that I coveted the moment I saw the removal men unloading it. Not that I was being nosy or anything. I just happened to be fixing the iffy blind at the front window at the time.
A few weeks later and next-door Nick and I have progressed to being on grumbling-about-the-weather terms and taking in each other’s mis-delivered parcels. He tells me he’s something to do with music production and I tell him about working on the help-desk giving advice on pruning wisteria and the eternal autumn-or-spring sowing debate when it comes to hardy annuals. He really likes Love-in-A-Mist and I feel a bit flustered and mutter, ‘Oh yes, Nigella. Very pretty.’ To which he laughs and says, ‘No, not really my type.’ And we leave it on a confusion of who-mean-what.
I’m so out of the habit of looking to find anyone attractive that I only realise I fancy him a bit when I’m in the garden on the first sunny day in ages, hanging out laundry. I’m suddenly hesitant about having my underwear dangling on the washing line in full view of his window and I stand there dithering, damp knickers in hand, conscious that they are very much the sort that can only be described as Sensible. I take them back inside and drape them over the sitting room radiator where Cassie takes one look, shrieks in full teen drama stylee and orders me to make sure they’re ‘like, to’ally gone’ before any of her friends come round and faint from repulsion.
A knock on the door has me stuffing my pants down the back of the sofa in a panic but it’s only Polly –accompanied by Princess who runs past me at the front door, straight to Boris’s food bowl –calling in to tell me she’s going away for several days and would I mind keeping an eye out for burglars, squatters and any chancer up a ladder claiming to be a window cleaner. I wish her a safe journey and she gives me a naughty wink –which means she’s probably not going to see a lot of the great outdoors on this trip, (lucky girl) as she totters off on her sky-heels, followed by little grey Princess who is still chewing my cat’s lunch as she goes.
There’s something bugging me though, something Polly hasn’t said and it isn’t till the next morning as I’m retrieving my knickers from behind the sofa and I hear her pink Mini roaring away down the street that I realise what it is. Any other time she’s been away for a few days, she’s asked me to call in and feed Princess. This time she hasn’t. Perhaps, I think, she’s taken the cat away with her but that evening as I drive home from work via the supermarket I see Princess sitting on Nick’s garden wall, washing her paws. Then Nick emerges from his front door, tip-toeing towards the cat in a furtive creeping-up way, holding out something in his hand and calling Princess to come to him. I sit in the car for a few moments with the window down, watching him sneaking up on her, trying not to laugh as I hear him softly calling, ‘Come on Princess, nice din-dins for you, pusscat.’ Princess gives him the look, flicks her tail at him and stalks off. So that’s it, I realise, the attack of the giggles vanishing abruptly, Polly has asked Nick to take care of Princess instead of me. I get a twinge of envy. Whatever Polly’s up to on this break, she’s clearly well onto Nick’s case for when she gets back. In my head I’m way down the imagination line, trying on hats for their wedding and holding back tears at the ceremony. Polly of course looks young, slender and stunningly bridal-radiant. Nick looks –as he always does –bloody gorgeous. I’d be tempted to wear green –the colour meant to bring bad luck to a bride and groom –but I’m really not that nasty. Yet.
‘Cat care going well then?’ I to Nick as I open the car boot and start to haul the bags out.
Nick, all sky blue linen shirt and a sexy little rip over the knee of his jeans, comes down the path and helps me unload and I wish I didn’t look so rushed and hot and that the new boy at the nursery had shown some sense of control with the hose pipe while watering the mixed bedding. The left side of me, hair to feet, is still noticeably damp.
‘Very highly strung,’ Nick murmurs, pulling a face in the direction of the rude rear end of the little cat.
‘Polly or Princess?’ I can’t resist saying.
‘Both probably. She has to take pills. The cat, I mean. Twice a day. Polly only told me that little gem just as she was dashing off –said Princess’s paw had been stung by a wasp and the vet’s given her anti-biotics. I tried it this morning but the pill ended up down a crack in the floorboards.’
I sympathise. Anyone with a cat knows about the pill scenario. One weekend when Polly went off, she left me with instructions vis
-à-vis Princess and some worming tablets. Nice.
We were in my kitchen now, Nick’s brought most of the bags in and shopping is spilling out all over the table. ‘Would you like some help?’ I ask him as I switch the kettle on. ‘Two can get a pill into a cat far easier than one.’
‘I was hoping you’d say that.’ Nick smiles at me, the skin by his eyes creasing appealingly into a fan. I pour cat biscuits into the bowl of the long-suffering Boris, open the back door and wait for Princess to hurtle in at the sound of a spoon tap-ping against the dish. We don’t have long to wait.
By the evening of day four we’re on a roll with the pill routine. It’s coffee for the morning session and in the evening I pour us each a glass of wine and we get under way with a few skill-sharpening sips before I wrap my old Adam Ant T-shirt firmly round Princess. Nick holds her tight while I try to shove the tablet throat-wards, avoiding her needle teeth. After a bit of a tussle, success gets us clinking glasses and relaxing on the garden sofa in the early evening sunshine, talking and laughing about anything and everything. My staff-discount phlox and tobacco flowers scent the soft warm air and in a giddy optimism I contemplate buying fancy underwear and consigning the pants of shame to the bin.
Polly is due back tonight. Nick comes round at nine in the morning with Princess and her pills. I look at him over the coffee I’m pouring and he’s looking at me and I can’t help wishing Polly was going to be away for a fortnight, not just this long weekend.
‘Right, so it’s just this one last pill,’ Nick says, watching Princess tucking into Boris’s breakfast.
‘Yep,’ I say, feeling a bit sad. These few days of having him casually in and out of my house have been such a delight. And yes, I know he’s only next door but what excuse can I find to get this close to him again?
Nick pulls the tablets out of his pocket, flicks one out too fast from the pack and it drops on the floor, rolling under the table. Just as I go to pick it up, Princess gets there first and pounces on it. We stand there, silent, watching her wolf it down, crunching it noisily.
Truly, Madly, Deeply Page 18