The Second-last Woman in England

by Maggie Joel

  ‘Mummy doesn’t run,’ Anne countered, evidently latching onto that image as though it undermined the veracity of Julius’s story.

  ‘Well, she does now, I just heard it. Mother was absolutely furious with Father. I expect they’ll be getting a divorce now.’

  ‘That’s not true! And anyway, Uncle Freddie’s not a deserter, I know he’s not.’

  ‘How do you know it? You don’t know anything. And you know what? Everyone will find out, all your friends and everyone at school, they’ll know that your uncle is a deserter and they’ll never let you forget it, ever!’

  ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! They won’t! It’s not true!’

  Anne stood furiously before him, her fists held tightly by her sides.

  ‘It is true and you standing there saying it isn’t isn’t going to change a bally thing, so you’d better get used to it because nothing will be the same again after this, you’ll see.’

  ‘Go away, get out!’ and Anne pushed him with both hands, only stopping when she saw Jean. Her hands at once dropped to her sides and her face registered dismay. Julius, seeing this, turned around and stared at Jean too.

  ‘Oh, it’s quite all right,’ said Jean. ‘No one knows but us, do they? I mean about your Uncle Freddie, the deserter,’ and she smiled from one child to the other. They gazed back at her expressionlessly. ‘Well, now, shall we see if Mrs Thompson has tea ready? I’m starving—aren’t you?’

  Tea was a somewhat tense affair.

  Jean sat on one side of the kitchen table absorbed in the task of pouring the tea, passing around the butter dish and carefully policing the order in which items were consumed, which meant ensuring everyone ate their slice of bread before starting in on the cakes. Anne sat opposite her glaring at her plate and moodily heaping dollops of raspberry jam onto her bread. Julius sat at the end of the table and appeared to take some satisfaction in spreading lemon curd to each corner of his bread as thinly as possible. This involved, turning the plate on its axis ninety degrees then spreading the lemon curd again from a difference angle until Jean remarked, ‘Julius, I would prefer it if you would just spread it and eat it,’ at which Julius threw his knife down and stuffed an angry mouthful of bread into his mouth.

  ‘I don’t want any more bread and jam,’ announced Anne, even though she had barely nibbled the slice on her plate. ‘I shall have a piece of fruit instead. Mother likes us to have fruit. What do you think, an orange or a banana?’

  She contemplated the large bowl of fruit on the dresser. It was piled high with tangerines and mandarins, a grapefruit, some red apples and two large bunches of bananas. Anne picked up the bananas and surveyed them with a critical eye. They were overripe and turning a little brown. In the end she discarded them and went with a mandarin.

  ‘Do you want one, Nanny?’ she said, deliberately not offering one to her brother. ‘I should avoid the bananas. They look a little off.’

  Jean shook her head.

  So much fruit. It swam before her eyes. The smell of it nauseated her. She knew the cost of an orange, of a banana, during the war, and it was more than mere money. It had cost everything in the world.

  Eventually the torturous meal was over and Anne made a point of leaving the table without saying ‘Please may I leave the table?’ and Julius made a point of pointing this out to Jean. Jean surprised him by replying that today was her birthday.

  ‘Oh. Well, many happy returns of the day,’ he replied grudgingly. ‘Are you going out this evening to celebrate?’

  ‘I am going out this evening, yes,’ she replied and Julius stared at her, clearly not expecting this.

  ‘Oh. Who with? Your young man?’

  ‘Never you mind, Julius. That’s my business, not yours. Now, let me get on with the clearing up.’

  She got up and went over to the sink, but not before she had seen the blood rush to his face.

  Julius turned and left the kitchen without another word and Jean sat down and finished her tea alone.

  It’s my birthday, thought Jean.

  Once it had snowed on her birthday. She must have been ten, eleven perhaps. It had been during the war and the snow had fallen a couple of nights before so that by the morning of her birthday it was a brown slush on the streets, though small piles still lay undisturbed on the bombsites. It had mostly melted away by the end of the day, but not before all the kids in Malacca Row had worked together to fashion a crude snowman. Someone had stuck a twig beneath the snowman’s pebble nose and a funny peaked cap on its head so that it resembled Herr Hitler—in a lopsided, lumpy kind of way—then they had all thrown hard little snowballs at it, and when the snow had run out they had thrown stones at it, then bricks, then they had all rushed up and kicked it to bits and stamped on it until there was nothing left but a pile of slush, and someone’s mum had come out and told them all off. It hadn’t snowed on her birthday since.

  The wind had got up and was blowing newspaper and dust down the street. Jean pulled her coat closer around her shoulders. She had told Julius she was going out and if he had supposed from this that she was going out with her young man, well, that was his mistake. But it was her birthday, after all. You had to go out on your birthday.

  As she approached the old hospital an ambulance trundled past and turned in through the gates and she paused, watching for a moment as the driver and a nurse climbed out, opened the doors and wheeled a patient out. All she could see of the patient was a shape outlined by a blanket. The person could have been dead. Or not.

  It reminded her of the war.

  She turned away and walked the short distance up Athelstan Gardens until she reached the little wrought-iron gate into the private garden. She had, once or twice, used her key herself to go into the garden without the children and on each occasion she had been peered at frostily by the dried-up old biddies who sat, all day, on its moss-covered benches. But by evening the gardens were deserted.

  She reached inside her bag, pulled out the key and inserted it into the padlock. The gate creaked in a harsh, rusted way that you never noticed in the daylight, and banged shut behind her. She paused, listening, then stepped silently into the shadows, picking her way carefully. The privet hedge that bordered the garden and kept it safe from prying eyes meant that at night the garden was all but pitch dark. The sky was overcast, but a break in the clouds allowed a single shaft of moonlight to illuminate the neat square of lawn. The benches were deserted now—even the pigeons had vacated—and she walked over to the furthest one, the one Mrs Wallis’s brother used to sit on.

  It was her birthday.

  Always, on your birthday, Dad would pull out the old tobacco tin and, as well as your presents, you got to dip into the tin and select a quote from the Bible, the same as the family did on Christmas Day. Last year Jean had gone through the Bible making her own tin of quotes. She had found an old pair of scissors and, though it felt wrong, an old and battered copy of the New Testament which she had cut up, mostly concentrating on the Psalms. Very soon she had amassed a collection of quotes and her tobacco tin was full. On the morning of her birthday she had opened the tin, closed her eyes and thrust her fingers inside. She had pulled out Matthew 5, verse 41, ‘And whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two’, which hadn’t been very good as no one was compelling her to go a mile with them, or indeed, to go anywhere at all. So she had pulled out another quote but that hadn’t been much better, nor the next one, nor the next. And very soon it had become apparent that, if there was no one to stop you from pulling out all of the quotes, then you might as well pull them all out. And it had become apparent, too, that not one of the quotes was exactly right. And how could that be when she had selected them so carefully? When they were always so exactly right in the old days, when you pulled them out of this same tin and the whole family was watching you?

  This birthday she had not bothered with the quotes. Instead she had come out to be by herself. She had come to the private garden.

  The bench was cold. The col
dness seeped up through her coat and through her dress and over her entire body. Beneath her feet the grass smelt damp and earthy. There had been a frost every morning this week, despite it being April, and it looked like there’d be another tomorrow. She shivered and wondered what time it was; whether it was too early to return to the house. They would notice if she got back too soon.

  Except that she knew that no one would notice what time the nanny got back from her night off.

  She got up off the bench and crossed the lawn, finding her way back to the gate and lifting the heavy latch silently as though someone in one of the houses might hear her.

  ‘Oy! What’s your game, then?’

  Jean jumped as a tall figure loomed out of the shadows.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ added the figure, a man, and Jean realised it was the young constable she’d run into weeks back.

  ‘What do you mean by jumping out at me like that?’ she replied indignantly. ‘Almost give me a turn.’

  ‘I though you was a burglar or something, didn’t I?’ He eyed her suspiciously. ‘What you doin’ in them gardens, anyway, this time of night?’

  ‘Praying,’ Jean replied.

  ‘Oh.’ He seemed uncertain how to reply to this. ‘This your street, then?’ he said instead and Jean nodded. ‘Looks pretty quiet, don’t it?’ he added.

  Jean gazed down the length of Athelstan Gardens and could see no one. She shivered slightly and hoped he didn’t notice.

  ‘It’s usually pretty quiet, I s’pose.’

  ‘Ha! You wouldn’t believe what goes on behind them curtains. Believe me, I seen it every night—husbands walkin’ out on their wives, kids runnin’ away from home, husbands comin’ home and findin’ their wives in bed with the fella next-door, housewives knockin’ back a bottle of sherry during the day then laying into the kids—or their husbands. You wouldn’t believe it.’

  Jean took a second look at the rows of discreetly painted front doors and elegant wrought iron railings and tried to imagine the chaos behind each door that he had just described.

  ‘Well, that’s as may be, but it ain’t like that in the household I live in, I tell can you that.’

  ‘Oh, I ain’t saying they’re all like it. Just some, that’s all.’

  Jean nodded noncommittally. What he had just described—well, it sounded more like Stepney than South Ken. He was just showing off. Trying to impress her.

  ‘What’s it like, then, livin’ with these posh people?’ and he jerked his head at the silent row of houses opposite.

  ‘Oh, they’re very well-to-do. Mr Wallis is in business. Very important, he is. A big shipping firm. Empire and Colonial.’

  ‘Oh.’ The policeman nodded without much interest.

  ‘Mrs Wallis goes to lunch and the hairdresser most days, and the theatre and all these cocktail evenings and big charity dos and what-have-you. She’s ever so elegant. And her brother works at the Palace.’

  She paused. Now it was she who was showing off.

  ‘How they treat you, then?’ he said. ‘Being a servant.’

  ‘I ain’t a servant. I’m the nanny. It’s hardly the same thing. And anyway, they treat me like one of the family.’

  She studied his profile in the moonlight. He had a boy’s face, the features still soft, a rash of acne on his cheek, his chin inexpertly shaved. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed.

  ‘Do you have a gun, then?’ she said, and he turned and stared at her.

  ‘A gun? Course I don’t have a gun!’

  ‘But they teach you how to use one?’

  ‘We’re coppers, not squaddies. What do we need with a gun? This ain’t Chicago, is it?’

  She said nothing in reply to this. Then, ‘Well, I gotta get back. They worry if I’m out late. Like I said, they treat me like one of the family.’

  He walked with her a short way up the street, then he paused, bathed in a circle of light from the streetlamp.

  ‘That your house, then?’ He peered up at it. ‘We did a call to that house a while back. Sure it was that one. I never forget a house we get called out to. Likely as not you end up back there, sooner or later.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Jean. ‘Not this house.’

  Chapter Twenty-four

  MAY 1953

  On the last Tuesday in May a van drew up outside the house at a little after eleven o’clock in the morning and two men got out. It was the half-term holiday and the children were both at home, so Jean joined Anne at her bedroom window and watched. The two men stood in the street and stretched and scratched themselves as though they had driven some considerable distance. As the address on their van indicated they had come from Fulham their stretching seemed excessive.

  One of the two men, the younger, reached for a cigarette and lit it then offered the packet to the second man. Only once both cigarettes had been lit and half smoked did either of the men survey the street in which they found themselves. A discussion broke out, a delivery chit on a clipboard was retrieved from the van’s cab and studied. Fingers were pointed and at last the two men appeared to reach a decision. They dropped their cigarettes on the pavement, crushed them underfoot and went up to the Wallises’ front gate.

  ‘Nanny, what do you think it is?’ demanded Anne.

  Downstairs the front door bell rang and Anne unfastened her bedroom window and, after a brief struggle, opened it.

  ‘They’re delivering something,’ Jean replied, and Anne groaned and rolled her eyes.

  ‘Obviously they’re delivering something—but what?’

  She leaned precariously out of the window, the way she had done on that very first day in the drawing room last September, only now she was two storeys up and if she fell from this height she probably would not survive. Through the open window they could hear the two men deep in discussion with Mrs Thompson.

  ‘I don’t care what you’re delivering. You’re not comin’ in ’ere with your muddy shoes. You’ll take ’em off before you come in or you ain’t comin’ in at all.’

  ‘Suits me, missus,’ said the younger of the two men with a shrug. ‘We’ll be only too happy to leave it ’ere on the doorstep, won’t we, Ted? Fifteen of these we gotta deliver today.’

  Anne leaned out even further, but by the time she had done so the discussion about footwear appeared to have been concluded and a compromise reached as both men had returned to their van and were even now opening up the doors at the back. But at this point, agonisingly, they paused for another cigarette break and Anne kicked impatiently at the wall beneath the window-sill with the toes of her shoes as she waited. After an excruciating delay they resumed their unloading, one disappearing inside the back of the van, the other waiting on the street outside.

  And what they unloaded was a box. A large cardboard box, square or perhaps oblong in shape and large enough that it took both of them to heave it out and ease it onto a little two-wheeled trolley. The box was obviously very heavy indeed as the two men puffed and panted as they pulled it through the gate and hitched it up over the first step.

  ‘Careful!’ said the elder man as the younger man pushed a little too vigorously.

  Clearly Anne could not be expected to stand by and watch, so she left the window and ran out of her room. Jean followed at a more sedate pace in time to see Anne run smack into Julius who was emerging from his own bedroom.

  ‘Did you see? Something’s being delivered,’ she gasped breathlessly.

  Julius regarded them both wearily and appeared less than impressed.

  ‘Oh that, yes,’ he replied, off-handedly. ‘I’m well aware of that.’

  ‘No, you’re not. You’re just saying that.’

  ‘Am I? All right then, I shan’t tell you,’ and he turned and went with a shrug back into his bedroom.

  Anne stood in an apparent agony of indecision, then turned and noticed Jean standing in her bedroom doorway. Anne scowled at her as though Jean had no right to be watching her and Jean smiled back.

  ‘All r
ight,’ Anne declared, marching into Julius’s room. ‘What is it, then?’

  Jean followed, two steps behind.

  Julius was sitting at his desk, apparently studying. He sighed at her question and laboriously closed his book.

  ‘Obviously,’ he began, drawing out the moment, ‘it’s a television set. They’re getting it in time for the Coronation. Surely you knew?’

  A television! thought Jean. Of course: the Coronation Day party. A few weeks ago Mr and Mrs Wallis had begun making arrangements for a party on the day of the Coronation—a list of attendees, the merits of various caterers, a possible menu of food items, had all been discussed at length. Mr Wallis, she remembered, had been curiously excited by the idea of a party. But then Mr Paget had come around and words had been spoken and Mrs Wallis had stormed out. There had been no mention of the party since.

  Anne actually gasped. Then she scowled.

  ‘Anyway, I already knew that,’ she said. ‘We both knew, didn’t we, Nanny?’

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ sighed Julius. ‘Anyway, I don’t know why you’re wetting your knickers. It’s just television. It’s hardly something to get excited about. In fact,’ and now he turned around and solemnly laid down his pen, ‘it’s actually a very bad thing. Television heralds the end of all cultural and intellectual endeavour, Anne, my girl. It’s the thin end of the wedge for civilisation as we know it,’ and he fixed her with a disapproving look.

  ‘But now we shall be able to watch Aunt Felicity!’ Anne replied as all the manifold implications of Television began to formulate in her mind.

  Julius raised a shocked eyebrow. ‘And why on earth should we want to do that?’

  But Anne, it was apparent, was in heaven. Television had arrived at number 83 Athelstan Gardens, and in time for the Coronation! Nothing would ever be the same again.

  The television set was positioned, not without much straining and cursing on the part of the two delivery men, in the drawing room on the first floor.