by Juliet West
She sat up and drank the last of her wine. Charles reached out and touched the lobe of her ear. ‘Beautiful earrings,’ he said. ‘French?’
Bea nodded. ‘My husband brought them back—’ She blushed again and bit her lip. It seemed wrong to have mentioned Harold, yet after all he was the reason they were here. She pictured him for a moment, sitting at home with a glass of Watney’s and the evening paper, trying to ignore the ticking of the clock.
‘Well, your husband is a lucky man,’ said Charles. ‘And I have no doubt that you would make the most wonderful mother. Here’s hoping, eh?’
She nodded, and felt her throat swell with emotion. A baby. Please God, a baby. It was likely, surely, after all Dr Cutler’s talk of dates and optimum times, her temperatures and her charts. Everything had been so precise.
Bea tore open the purse lining and took the advert from its hiding place. She’d kept it all these years, just in case, but in the event she’d never dared to suggest a second visit; a brother or a sister for Tom. Standing over the sink, she lit a match and touched the flame to the corner. The paper burned yellow, a sudden star tilting at the moonlight, fading quickly and fluttering to ash.
It was too awful to contemplate, the thought of Tom getting involved with Hazel’s family and finding himself in a room with Charles. Lucia had gossiped that Mrs Alexander was going through divorce proceedings. Charles was the woman’s beau. It wasn’t fanciful to imagine he might become Hazel’s stepfather.
In the morning she would write to Tom. She’d mention in passing the bazaar, and the envelope night, how she’d got to know a few of the blackshirt girls, and that all those rumours of loose morals amongst the young women at HQ were certainly true. She composed the sentences in her head: A girl called Hazel Alexander is the most notorious. She’s carrying on with a district commander (married), and by all accounts there are two other poor unfortunates dancing to her tune . . .
That should do it. Any fond thoughts he might still have of Hazel would be well and truly squashed. It was harsh but it was necessary. Especially if, as she suspected, the girl had a baby and goodness only knew about the parentage.
She was sorry for Hazel, really she was. But as she rinsed the ashes down the plughole, she whispered, ‘It must not happen.’ Tom and Charles must never meet.
If that meant leaving the movement, well, she would leave.
Whatever it took to protect her boy, that is what she would do.
26
‘Take cover!’
Armistead’s shout echoed in Tom’s ears as he flung his body flat to the hillside. Take cover – what a bloody joke that was. How was a scraggy olive tree going to protect him from Franco’s machine-gun fire? Their own machine guns were useless – he cursed again to think of whoever it was who’d loaded the cartridge belts with the wrong ammunition. Six hours they’d been on this ridge, attempting an advance. Every time they moved a few yards down into the valley, they lost another ten or twelve men. Three men for every yard, he reckoned. He’d tried to help his comrades, dragged one lad behind a blackened bush and gave him water, but the blood pooled in a red halo, and his eyes closed before he could even swallow. There was no saving him.
Yet Tom had survived this far. Jacob too, and now night was falling and Armistead told the company to dig in. It was February and the ground was hard, but they made a foxhole of sorts and collapsed, back to back, hugging their legs, resting their foreheads on their knees.
Jacob’s voice had dulled. There was no longer any humour in it, no lines of poetry. ‘Wrong bloody bullets,’ said Jacob. Tom could feel the back of Jacob’s head, slowly shaking from side to side. ‘Wrong bullets.’
‘We’ll be all right,’ said Tom. ‘New ammunition’s on its way. Reinforcements.’
‘’S’good . . .’ His voice tailed into sleep.
The valley was almost silent, just the occasional sniper shot into the darkness and the faint sound of the Jarama river rushing below. Tom screwed his eyelids shut. This was what he’d wanted, wasn’t it? Proper action, a real show? He’d been desperate to get out of the training camp. They’d spent too long there, long enough for those letters to arrive. Long enough for Hazel to make a fool of him once more.
He should never have written that daft declaration of love. Oh, she’d replied quicker than he could have hoped, and she swore she loved him too. There were complications, she said, but she would explain everything once he was home. Complications? Wasn’t everything that was worth fighting for bound to be complicated? They could overcome any obstacles, he was certain of that. For a fortnight he treasured her letter, hurled himself back into love with a kind of violence that gave him strength. Hazel’s love was something to fight for, and when he sang the ‘Internationale’ after morning drill he felt boundless as the eagle which circled above, sovereign of the skies.
Christmas at Albacete had been almost enjoyable. There was a barrel of brandy, chicken stew, chocolate bars and almonds. Tom had a good feeling about the coming year. Battles would be won in 1937. The Chronicle would publish his eyewitness reports. He would return home and Hazel would be waiting. His mum and dad . . . well, they would forgive him.
The letter from his mum came on the last day of the year. Jacob tossed it to him as he crouched in the shelter, polishing his disassembled rifle. He put the rifle back together before opening the envelope. The usual small talk, and then the bullet. A girl called Hazel Alexander is the most notorious. He tried not to believe it at first, but it was no use. What reason had he to doubt his own mother? She had no grounds to invent such a story. Of course it was true! He knew for a fact that Hazel was easy – hadn’t she given herself in the summer house that stormy night? Kissing him, unbuckling his belt, letting him take her without so much as a murmur of protest. At the time he’d convinced himself it was something more than sex; it was an act of love between them, beautiful and unstoppable – sacred – but now he saw it was nothing of the sort. Not for her, anyway. By all accounts there are two other unfortunates dancing to her tune. What an idiot he’d been! At least now he understood the ‘complications’ she’d mentioned. The complication was that she was a faithless tart.
‘Tom!’ Jacob was shaking him, kicking him in the back. ‘Jesus Christ, Tom, wake up!’
He blinked and scrambled to his feet. The drone of engines from the west was unmistakable. Heinkels, flying low. Where was their air cover, the Russian fighters? The machine guns were no use – they’d have to defend with their rifles. It would be funny if it wasn’t so deadly, so pathetically serious. Around him he could see the shadows of men taking up their positions. He could weep at their bravery. Giants, these men, every one. Whatever happened, he would never regret coming here. He would be a communist till he died, a defender of the people . . .
Bombs dropped on the neighbouring hill. The air seemed to scream before the dull burst of the explosion. Now the planes were overhead, the German gunners strafing. Tom turned as he heard Jacob’s cry, saw his body thrown into the air. He crawled, cursing, on his stomach towards the spot where his friend had landed. Jacob’s guts were open to the sky, wet and pulsing, coiled like a thrown-down skipping rope. Pages of poetry flapped and scudded over the hard earth and Tom scrabbled to retrieve them, trying to keep the pages flat, the verses true. And then the gunners fired again and there was nothing but darkness.
27
August 1937
At last Jasmin had started to sleep through the night. She was walking now, toddling around the flat at astonishing speed. Mrs Allen at the nursery said she kept them all on their toes. ‘Fanny Fanackapan’, was Mrs Allen’s nickname for Jasmin, spoken with a half-smile that seemed to mask a grimace.
Edith rarely called at the flat. She was engaged to a banker named Martin and spent all her time on long walks and picnics and boating on the Serpentine. Edith barely gave two hours a week to the movement. If she wasn’t careful she’d get her service badge taken away, said Lucia, and then it would be the uniform – not that their
uniforms counted for much now they’d been banned in public – and then Lucia would begin a rant about government crooks and the outrageous attacks on civil liberties.
It was a shame about Edith. Hazel had never much liked her, but she’d always been willing to mind Jasmin on drumming nights. Fortunately, the porter’s wife from along the road had stepped in. She loved babies, she said, which was lucky because Lucia never seemed able to help out. She’d screwed a bolt to the inside of her bedroom door so that Jasmin couldn’t toddle in. Sometimes Hazel wondered whether Lucia would ask them to leave the flat, but there had never yet been any hint. Hazel made sure she was useful: if it wasn’t for her, the place would be an awful tip and there’d never be any proper food or a clean pair of drawers.
‘Good-ger,’ Jasmin babbled, placing another wooden brick atop a wobbly tower.
‘Good girl,’ said Hazel, looking up from the ironing board. ‘Good girl!’
Jasmin laughed and clapped her hands, but her fingers brushed against the tower and the bricks crashed down. She began to wail.
‘Shhh, shhh. We mustn’t wake Lucia.’ Hazel unplugged the iron and lifted Jasmin from the high chair, putting her hand over her mouth to stifle the yell. It wasn’t nine yet but perhaps they could have an early walk. Jasmin liked to watch the squirrels in Kensington Gardens, and by mid-morning the older children would begin to arrive at the pond with their little sailing boats.
She opened the larder cupboard to check there was enough milk and bread for Lucia’s breakfast, and found a biscuit to keep Jasmin quiet while she tidied the kitchen, emptying the leaves from the teapot and rinsing out her cup. Sometimes Philip stayed on a Friday night, but she was certain that Lucia had come home alone last night. She laid out breakfast things for one.
There was a letter face down on the doormat in the hall, a small creamy-coloured envelope of the kind Tom had used. She snatched it up, but the letter was addressed to Lucia. The postmark was from Germany – it would be from one of the fascists she’d palled up with on her trip to Berlin.
She let the envelope drop back to the floor. Idiot. Tom had not written since December – not for eight whole months – so why would he suddenly write now? It was a good thing, she reminded herself, that the letters had stopped. He must have regretted his outburst of affection, felt overwhelmed, perhaps, by her gushing reply. In any case, the correspondence had been a deception, at least on her part. If he ever came back from Spain, she would have to carry on the lie, the pretence that Jasmin didn’t exist, or else she could tell the truth, with every chance then that he would disappear for good. He didn’t want to be tied down with a child. Hadn’t he told her that when they were first together? He’d shuddered to imagine being stuck in a room with a screaming baby. Perhaps, somehow, he’d got wind of the truth, and that was why the letters had stopped.
Every day she bought a paper and scanned the pages for news of the Spanish war. It was not going well for the Republicans. British casualties were published regularly in the News Chronicle, and to date his name hadn’t appeared. She even went to King Street once, to the communists’ headquarters, thinking she would go inside and ask if there was any news of Thomas Smart. But she lost her nerve – a blackshirt at Red HQ! – and left Covent Garden with a pound of apples and a bunch of spring violets. On the bus home, she reassured herself that if anything had happened to Tom, there was certain to be gossip at party meetings. A turncoat blackshirt, killed fighting the fascists in Spain? People would crow and say it was just deserts. No, Tom was all right. He might even be back home, in love with some other girl.
It didn’t matter. She and Jasmin would manage, because Hazel had a plan. Each week she saved a little money. She’d even stopped smoking, adding the extra pennies to her tin. Her throat felt better for it, too; she hadn’t had a coughing attack in weeks. In two years or so she would have enough money to rent a flat, or a decent-sized room, just her and Jasmin. Pimlico was the plan, somewhere close to work, which meant she would save money on buses and Tubes, and Jasmin could go to the infant school which was close to her office. Two years seemed a horribly long time, but Hazel liked having the goal; it buoyed her on the darkest nights, gave her a focus when she lay in bed trying not to listen to Lucia in the bedroom with Philip, the cries that might have been pain or pleasure and seemed, in some strange way, designed to mock Hazel as she attempted to sleep, alone in her small bed.
It was cloudy but the air was warm. She walked quickly along the High Street towards the Gardens, ignoring Jasmin’s pleas to be let down from the pram. ‘Down, down!’ she cried, kicking out her legs and twisting against the harness. Passers-by smiled sympathetically at Hazel, and as she waited to cross the road, a tall thin woman struck up conversation. ‘Little one looks determined,’ she said, dipping her head towards the pram. Jasmin quietened at the sight of the woman’s old-fashioned hat with its bunches of waxed fruit, the little fake bird stuck with dull black feathers.
‘She’s desperate to see the squirrels,’ said Hazel.
The woman shifted her gaze to the pram handle – to the fingers of Hazel’s left hand.
‘Your little sister, is it?’ she asked.
Dear Christ, thought Hazel, I’m sick of this. To her work colleagues she was a single girl. To the blackshirts she was an abandoned wife and mother. Always playing a part, just to make other people feel better. She was eighteen now, old enough to be her own person, to stand her ground. What would happen if, for once, she played herself?
‘My daughter.’ Hazel caught the gleam of judgement in the woman’s eye and felt a snip of sudden rage. ‘If it’s my wedding ring you’re wondering about, I’m not married.’
The woman jerked her head back as if to deny that she had been ogling Hazel’s naked finger, and her eyes darted across the road and up towards Kensington Church Street where a soldier stood sentry outside the army barracks.
‘And this is what our laddies fought the war for, is it?’ she said. Her soft voice became coarse and loud. ‘So that hussies like you could swan about with their –’ she hesitated, her lips forming the B and then pulling back to show a ragged line of teeth with sharp brown canines – ‘with their offspring, and not even an ounce of shame does she show.’ The woman was addressing the wider street now, shaking her head so that the bird on her hat seemed to peck and scold in time with her wagging finger.
Hazel stood paralysed for a moment. What had she been thinking, goading the woman like that? She could not muster a response; she wanted only to disappear. Spinning the pram on its back wheels, she began to run, turning right onto Palace Gate and then down Gloucester Road. She almost tripped over a man sweeping litter from the doorway of a pub. ‘Mind yourself, darling,’ he called. Jasmin thought it was a great adventure and she clapped her hands, screeching ‘Mumumumum!’ as they raced along the pavement. At the bottom of the road there was a newsagent’s shop. Hazel left the pram outside, ignoring Jasmin’s shouts. In the shop she bought a packet of Pall Malls, a box of matches and a bar of Fry’s.
She gave Jasmin the chocolate and lit a cigarette. She would smoke it here, on the street corner, in this seedy neighbourhood, because that was where she belonged. The sole of her shoe stuck to the pavement – there was a broken bottle, a dried-up puddle of orangeade, insects crawling at the edges. An ant ventured onto her shoe, her stocking, but she didn’t bother to brush it off. She remembered what Charles had told her. She was a slut, a whore.
The air here stank of motor fumes and morning-after booze. She smelt the whisky on Charles’s breath, felt his hand gripping the top of her arm, pushing her back into the dark summer house. His clothes were wet from the storm. Soaked through.
He had been spying. Had he seen everything?
She was nothing but a whore, he slurred, and she deserved all she got. If she ever played around with that young lad again he would have him in court for rape. And then he stared at her, silently put a hand to her cheek.
‘What about you?’ Hazel had asked afterwards. �
�What if I told the police about you?’
Charles was quiet for a second and Hazel wondered whether he might have sobered up, whether he might feel any remorse for what he had just done. But then he ruffled her hair and laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t think the police would believe a silly sixteen-year-old with a crush on her mother’s lover. Do you?’ His laughter died away and he shook his head in mock-seriousness. ‘Imagine the humiliation. You’d be the talk of the town.’
‘But—’
‘Don’t bother denying it. I’ve seen you looking at me. I know what you’ve been reading this summer.’
He picked up the book from the floor and placed it on the tea chest.
Hazel wanted to rip the book to pieces. How foolish she had been, to believe van de Velde’s words. Charles had revealed the truth to her. Sex wasn’t about love and equality. It was about humiliation and pain.
She lit another cigarette and stared down at her daughter. The yellow cardigan was covered in dribbles of chocolate. ‘Good girl,’ said Hazel, turning her head to blow a stream of smoke up towards the sunless sky.
Ridiculous to think she could ever get a flat on her own, to imagine that she could exist without lies. No respectable landlord would rent a flat to an unmarried mother. She supposed that Charles was right: she was no better than a whore. She needed Lucia. She needed the movement. This was her family and she must be grateful for it.
28
‘Tonight?’
‘It can’t be helped, Frangie. I’d rather spend the evening with you, naturally, but Veronica says this client is absolutely desperate.’