by Joanna Toye
Jean descended into another torrent of sobs. Self-pitying maybe, when it was Kenny who deserved them, but also those of a woman at the end of her rope, Dora could tell.
‘Look, Jean,’ she said, ‘it’s like all these things. They look like Mount Everest at first, like you’ll never overcome them, but bit by bit they look more and more like a pile of matchwood. And really, however bad it is for you, it’s a heck of a lot worse for Kenny. Think of what he’s been though, kept behind wire for four years, losing an arm, family dead and gone without a goodbye, and who knows if those that are left – his brothers – are dead or alive? No wonder he’s a bit sunk in himself. As time goes on, he’ll get used to things, you’ll get used to things. Like you say, there’s no choice.’
Jean gave a shuddering sigh and sniffed again. She pressed the backs of her hands to her eyes.
‘I wish I could believe you, I really do. I don’t feel good about it, but at the same time … I dunno. I haven’t got your saintly patience, that’s the trouble!’
She attempted a smile and Dora patted her hand.
‘Look, I’ll tell Jim and Lily if that’s all right with you. Maybe Jim and Les can take Kenny out for drink one night. Perhaps with a bit of company his own age, he might start to come round a bit.’
‘Oh, would you?’ Jean lunged at the idea like a pickpocket in the blackout. ‘I’m sure that’d help. It’d help me, anyway,’ she admitted with a tinge of guilt.
At teatime, Dora did as she’d promised and though Jim wasn’t a great drinker, he went straight round and asked Kenny, who was smoking in the yard, if he’d like to join him at the pub on Saturday.
Kenny was tall and thin. His hair had grown out since his POW days and fell lank and greasy over his forehead. His face was sallow, his eyes red-veined. At Jim’s offer, he shrugged.
‘What for?’
‘No reason,’ Jim said. ‘Just being neighbourly.’
Kenny shrugged again.
‘Up to you,’ he said, stubbing out his cigarette on the wall.
‘Well?’ asked Lily when Jim came back.
‘Yes, we’re on,’ said Jim, covering up Kenny’s lack of grace. ‘It’s the least we can do.’
On Saturday night, as Jim got ready to go out, Lily pretended pique.
‘That’s right, leave me to a bit more WVS wool-winding. I notice you never take me out for a drink!’
‘No, I don’t,’ said Jim, pulling her close, ‘because there’s no nice private back row at the pub like there is at the Gaumont. Ever thought of that?’
After the reception he’d had last time, as Jim knocked on the Crosbies’ back door, he was wondering if Kenny would actually come, but Kenny answered the door himself. The reddened stump which Jean found so hard to look at was protruding from the short sleeve of his shirt. Jim pinned on a smile.
‘Great. Let’s get going,’ he said.
To say conversation was sticky on the way to the pub was like saying the Western Desert was a bit bigger than Bournemouth beach. Kenny didn’t make things easy, answering only ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to most of Jim’s questions and they’d both dried up long before they arrived at Les’s local, the Bunch of Grapes.
Les broke away from a couple of off-duty soldiers he’d been talking to and came over.
‘How do, Jim,’ he said chirpily, ‘and Kenny, isn’t it?’
Then, unfortunately, he went to shake Kenny’s hand before realising it simply wasn’t there. Awkwardly, Les retracted his own in a sort of jerky salute, which made him look like a half-hearted member of the Hitler Youth.
‘Drink?’ said Jim quickly. ‘What’ll you have, Kenny?’
He bought them all a pint. Jim willed Les not to say, ‘Good health’ or even worse, as he often did after the first swig ‘Ah, this is what your right arm’s for!’ Thankfully he stuck to ‘Cheers.’
They found a table, and, still covering his embarrassment, Les launched into a story from the local paper, the Chronicle, about a pet parrot with a nice line in swear words. Jim topped it with his favourite from the paper, which had held the front page on the day after D-Day with the headline ‘Calamity on the Canal’, not a story about a brave attack that had seen the Nazis on the run in France, but a narrowboat slipping its moorings near the local locks. Kenny listened stony-faced.
‘Did you have a newspaper in the camp?’ Jim asked, trying to bring him into the conversation. ‘One you all wrote, I mean?’
Kenny stared at him. ‘When you’re doing sweet FA all day there’s not much to shout about, is there? Bunked up thirty to a hut, you know when someone’s broken wind. You don’t need a newspaper to tell you.’
Now it was Jim’s turn to be embarrassed, but Les leapt in.
‘Talking of FA,’ he said, ‘what about football? Who’s your team, Kenny? Are you a Liverpool man or Everton?’
This was a subject on which Kenny could, and did, become animated and Jim leant back and left them to it. Les was a keen Aston Villa supporter and was quick to point out Villa’s triumph over Everton in the 1887 FA Cup. Kenny rejoindered with Everton’s punishment of Les’s team the following year by beating them in the Premier League. They traded statistics and insults happily for twenty minutes, then, carried away with camaraderie, Les overstepped the mark.
‘How about a game of billiards?’ he suggested. ‘Settle some old scores that way!’
Kenny put his drink down so hard the beer slopped over the top of the glass.
‘Billiards?’ he said. ‘You taking the mickey? How about darts? Want to see someone blinded with me chucking left-handed?’
Les coloured scarlet.
‘I’m sorry, mate,’ he said. ‘I didn’t … um …’
‘You didn’t think!’ said Kenny. ‘Nobody does. Nobody knows what it’s like! You can stuff your drink!’
And he left.
‘Sorry, Jim,’ said Les. ‘I— We were getting on so well, it just seemed natural … My mouth ran away with me.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Jim. ‘It’s not easy. But it’s far harder for him.’
The war had come home to Hinton, and to Jim, in a way he hadn’t felt since he and Lily had been caught in the bomb blast that had ripped into Marlows. He knew from that experience that their physical injuries had been the least of it: the mental and emotional scars were far worse. They’d had to steel themselves to go into the town centre to see the devastation and to appreciate what a narrow escape they’d had; two people had been killed nearby. Jim and Lily had got over it; they had each other, and loving friends and family around them. Kenny had had no one for four years, no one when the accident happened, and no one who meant anything to him, or to whom he meant anything, now. Poor beggar, thought Jim. And when the war was over, and thousands, millions of servicemen – and prisoners – God willing, came back, Kenny wouldn’t be the only one. It was a sobering thought. For the first and only time since he’d been rejected by the Army because of his poor vision, Jim was glad he hadn’t been able to join up.
Lily was still awake when he got back.
‘How did it go?’ she asked, coming downstairs in her dressing gown.
‘It didn’t, I’m afraid,’ said Jim. ‘A bit of a disaster. I’ll tell you about it, but first, come here.’ He took her in his arms and pulled her close. ‘Am I glad I’ve got you.’
Next day Jean called round to Dora’s. Sadly, Dora reported how the evening had gone.
‘You see what I’m up against?’ Jean shook her head. ‘He’s so bitter.’
‘He’s got a lot to be bitter about,’ said Dora. ‘But there is help, you know. There’s ex-servicemen’s charities … and I’m sure we could do something for him at the WVS or Red Cross if he’d only come along and see us.’
‘Don’t you think I’ve tried?’ snapped Jean. ‘He won’t shift to help himself, that’s the trouble.’ Her attempts at trying harder with her nephew-by-marriage had obviously been short-lived. ‘Walter’s tried to talk to him about getting fitted with a new arm, a what-
do-you-call-it … a pros-something?’
‘Prosthetic?’
‘That’s the one. But oh, no, Kenny just stomped off to his room! I dunno what we’re going to do with him.’
For once, nor did Dora.
In her dinner hour next day, Lily went down to Beryl’s shop to hear what Les had made of it. Beryl leapt to her husband’s defence.
‘At least he got the bloke talking!’ Beryl declared. ‘That was a big improvement from what I heard. And then … well, yeah, it was unfortunate but that’s my Les. He speaks – and acts, sometimes – before he thinks.’
Beryl was hand sewing some tiny beads back on a Juliet cap, and Lily’s eyes drifted to the bobby-dazzler engagement ring reposing on the spike. Had Les acted before thinking when he’d acquired that?
Beryl saw Lily’s look.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said. ‘All of you. You think Les could never have afforded a ring like that.’
‘No, I—’
‘Yes, you do! Well, you’re right! He didn’t!’ Beryl put her sewing aside, jumped up and put the ring on her finger. She came back and twirled it under Lily’s nose. ‘That is, he did, but only ’cos it’s paste! They’re rhinestones!’
Lily gaped at her.
‘No!’
‘Good, innit?’ Beryl smirked. ‘Had you fooled, anyway, and everyone else!’
‘Oh Beryl. I’m so …’ Lily started to laugh. ‘We worried he might have done something silly to get the money, something illegal even!’
‘Blimey, not got much faith in him, have you? He’s no Einstein, my Les, but he’s not that daft!’
Daft enough to flirt with betting and black-market peaches, thought Lily, but kept quiet. Beryl extended her hand and looked lovingly at the glittering gems.
‘He was getting in a right tizzy about it, bless him, sat me down all solemn and had to tell me it’d be next year before he could afford anything, what with Bobby needing shoes, and the bedroom needing papering. But I said to him, Les, I know we’re solid, I don’t need a fistful of diamonds to prove it!’
Lily nodded. Les was nothing like as dynamic as his flamboyant wife, but that was the point – like two poles of a compass, but the one couldn’t exist without the other. Les might have his mad moments, like the peaches, but he’d encouraged Beryl to start her business and his steady wage had already seen her shop through a thin time. He was full of admiration for the way she’d turned things around; he was devoted to her as a husband and adored his son. For Beryl, who’d had a miserable childhood with a violent father and had never known security, Les was her rock.
‘I was only teasing, leaving all those pictures of film stars round the house!’ Beryl resumed. ‘As long as it looks the part, that’s all I care about. I’d already seen this little beauty in the pawnshop. Les got out what he’d saved and we snapped it up next day.’
‘Beryl, you’re the end, you really are!’ Lily hugged her friend. ‘I’m so relieved!’
‘You must be barmy even thinking it was real! The insurance alone’d break us! Now let me get on with this sewing, can you? Some of us have got work to do!’
Chapter 17
Lily had work to do as well, and lots of it, as September slid into October and the leaves crisped around the edges and began to fall once more.
Miss Frobisher had ordered the Christmas stock – or what she could get hold of – long ago, but with her wedding day getting closer, she was doubly busy ensuring she’d covered everything for the days she was taking off afterwards. It was left to Lily to chase deliveries, query invoices, and organise the stockroom. Miss Thomas and Miss Temple, the department’s elderly part-timers, had become more elderly and more part-time as the war had gone on, so Lily had more than a full-time job. Jim was run ragged planning the arrival of Father Christmas on his sleigh (a milkman’s cart decked out in crepe paper) and his installation in the grotto. This year Jim had decided that the juniors keeping the queue in order would be dressed as elves, which meant long discussions with Haberdashery, who’d have to kit them out in whatever scraps they could patch together.
A few days into October, Miss Frobisher drew Lily aside.
‘It’s about the 21st,’ she said. This was the wedding day, a Saturday. ‘We’d have very much liked you and Jim – Mr Goodridge – to be our witnesses, but it makes staffing too difficult. If both Mr Simmonds and I aren’t here, then Mr Goodridge really has to be. And it’s the same for you on the department.’
‘Oh, but we’d never have expected it!’ said Lily quickly, though the thought had crossed her mind, and not just because of the extraordinary coincidence of them both getting engaged on the same day. Lily and Jim had been the first to know that their bosses were seeing one other, a confidence they’d kept to themselves until the older pair had decided it was time to broadcast the news more widely in the store.
‘My neighbour – the one who looks after John for me – and an Army friend of Mr Simmonds’s will do the honours,’ Miss Frobisher explained. ‘It’s going to be a very quiet wedding and no reception, as such, but neither of us wants a fuss.’
‘I hope there’ll be photographs!’
Lily was dying to know what Miss Frobisher, always so poised, so elegant, would be wearing, and she knew Beryl was too.
‘I can promise you that.’ Miss Frobisher smiled, then switched back into professional mode. ‘Now, what did you manage to get out of the manufacturer about supplies of stockinette?’
Miss Frobisher took the Friday before her big day off to get ready – she was having her hair done, and her nails. Mr Simmonds was at work and doing his best to cover his nerves in what he called his ‘debriefing’ with Jim, though the way his hand shook as he handed over his master keys to the tills rather gave the game away.
‘I leave it all to you,’ he said heartily when they’d finished, clapping Jim on the back. ‘Which is fatal. I’ll probably come back to find the entire first floor reorganised!’
‘Only the first floor?’ quipped Jim. They shook hands. ‘You won’t need it, because I know you’ll be very happy, but – good luck!’
As she took down the blackout on Saturday morning, Lily could hardly have been more excited if it had been her own wedding day. It had rained in the night and the yard was gleaming, but already the clouds were thinning and a washy sun was trying to peep out. Jim swung her hand as they walked to work in the nip of an autumn morning.
‘We’re next!’ he said.
It was Miss Temple’s turn to work that Saturday, but when she arrived on Childrenswear, Lily was astonished to see Miss Thomas there as well. Miss Thomas explained coyly that she’d been phoned at home by Staff Office and asked to come in. Lily was frankly peeved. Miss Frobisher might have said! All right, Saturdays could be busy, but did Miss Frobisher really not trust her to cope? Downstairs, Jim was having much the same thought. He’d expected to cover both floors in Mr Simmonds’s absence, but the first person he saw as he descended the stairs was the retired ground-floor supervisor, Mr Bertram.
‘Asked back for the day,’ Mr Bertram announced gleefully. ‘A bit of extra pocket money before Christmas. The wife’s delighted.’
Jim was rather less so but smiled politely. Cedric Marlow was finishing his tour of the counters, and Jim moved towards the stairs so he could be on hand when the old man’s tour of the first floor began. Jim couldn’t complain, of course – especially as he’d moaned before about how hard it was to manage with no cover for staff holidays or sickness – all in the name of wartime economy. But as they climbed the stairs together, his uncle turned to him.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘It’s not that I don’t have faith in you. I know you and Miss Collins would love to have been at a certain event today, and the happy couple would have liked you there. The extra staffing – there’s an additional body on Childrenswear as well – means that even if you have to miss the ceremony, you can both pop out during your dinner hour to see them emerge.’
Jim almost stumbled up the next step.
‘That’s very thoughtful, sir!’ he said. ‘Thank you! Lily – Miss Collins – will be thrilled!’
The ceremony was at twelve thirty, so with a bit of juggling over breaks, and swiftly arranged passes out, Jim and Lily hot-footed it to the Register Office for one o’clock.
They could see the wedding group as they approached. The sun had done its best and was shining fitfully through the coppery leaves of the beech trees. The photographer was setting up his camera with young John, spruce in a little suit and bow tie, asking questions and taking it all in. Miss Frobisher’s neighbour was making polite conversation with a straight-backed chap in an Army uniform. Mr Simmonds was smart in his best suit, and his new wife complemented the autumn palette in a dress of bronze panne velvet with a fox-fur cape. They were holding hands and looking slightly dazed, as if they weren’t quite sure what had just happened. Then the bride spotted Lily and Jim. She nudged Mr Simmonds who did an almost comical double take, then bounded down the Town Hall steps towards them.
‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded. ‘If you’re both here, who’s minding the shop?’
Typical! thought Lily, as Jim explained Mr Marlow’s subterfuge. Mr Simmonds’s wedding day and his first thought was the store! But weren’t they all like that, the staff at Marlows? The shop was their second home and their colleagues an extended family. Lily had met Gladys and Beryl there – and Jim of course – and she and Jim had almost been killed there. Jim always said that when he did die they’d find Marlows engraved on his heart.
‘Who’d have thought Mr Marlow had such a secretive side?’ Mr Simmonds marvelled.
‘Or was such a romantic?’ Miss Frobisher smiled. She’d always be Miss Frobisher to Lily and she’d remain so in the store – female staff were always addressed as ‘Miss’, married or not.
Lily looked at Jim. They knew from seeing him at Mrs Tunnicliffe’s that Cedric Marlow was more than capable of keeping things close to his chest.