The Best in Blountmere Street (The Blountmere Street Series Book 2)

by Arnold, Barbara

  ‘I'm fine. How was Butlin's?’

  ‘Big. Until you've been there, you just can't imagine it.’

  ‘Were you able to see anyone about being a Red Coat?’ I ask, struggling to a sitting position.

  ‘Better than that, I talked to the Entertainment Manager. He said when I’m ready I should get in touch with him again.’ Herbie sits on the pebbles beside me. ‘It's a good start.’

  I smile and wonder what it would be like if deciding whether or not to work at Butlin’s in a few years’ time, was your only real concern.

  ‘What about you? Have you sat here all the time I've been gone?’ Herbie barely touches my hair before he withdraws his hand.

  ‘I went into the town for a drink - orange juice.’

  ‘Are you sure you didn't mind me going like that and leaving you on your own?’

  ‘Of course, I didn't. I liked having time to lie on the beach and meditate.’

  He takes my hand, strokes it briefly and lets it go. ‘You're so different.’

  ‘Different?’ It’s the last word I want to hear.

  ‘Deep, mysterious,’ he laughs. ‘A mysterious woman.’

  “Mysterious” is better than “different”. It’s nonsense of course. There isn't anything deep or mysterious about me. Then, again, maybe there is: a secret father, for instance.

  ‘Ready for a walk, and fish and chips?’ Herbie asks, drawing himself to a standing position again. He pulls me to my feet, then swings my hand backwards and forwards as we saunter along the promenade, at the end of which is a bench looking out on to the sea. The woman with the two small boys who had been in the same carriage passes us. The boys look at us and giggle. When they’ve gone, Herbie twists me towards him and kisses me. It’s light, tender and unstirring, but at least this time I don’t run away.

  Then we eat fish and chips on the front, dangling our legs over the sea wall, occasionally kissing. We travel home in a languorous companionship produced by sun, sand and sea, and amble through the Cigar Box Kingdom as the sky relinquishes its pink tinge to night. In the distance, I can see Dad in our front garden.

  ‘I hope he's not mad because I've got you home too late.’ Herbie lets go of my hand.

  ‘I told him I wouldn't be in early. He's probably just finished watering the garden.’ I suspect he’s demonstrating his fatherly role, in an effort to make a point. I wave as Dad runs towards me.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Just after four, while Herbie and I were walking along the front at Bognor, quietly and without fuss, Mum hanged herself from her favourite blossom tree in the grounds of the asylum with some twine she’d found in the gardens.

  Everything has been accounted for. An official report from the asylum has been produced and accepted without comment or action. The asylum has insisted there had been no reason for them to believe “the deceased patient” was not in charge of her full faculties, given the success of the recent treatment she had received. Unfortunately, the grounds-men had left for the day, or one of them would surely have noticed her actions as being suspicious. With the cunning of the seriously deranged, the inmate had probably known this. Those with responsibility for the inmate’s wellbeing had been of the opinion that gardening was therapeutic and harmless, given her recent lucidity. They reiterated that the inmate had not demonstrated any suicidal tendencies and for the last days of her life had appeared sane.

  Our one and only pre-war suitcase stands outside my door, as, heavy with sleep, I leave my room. It’s been a month since Mum’s death and my only respite is in sleeping. I kick the case aside as I make my way outside to the lavatory. It isn’t the beginning of another day but the continuation of a never-ending one.

  ‘I’ve put the case out for you,’ Dad says as I walk through the kitchen.

  ‘Why?’ Words take energy.

  ‘So you can pack your things.’ With his back to me, Dad swirls his window cleaning leather in a bucket of warm water.

  ‘Have we been given a date to move?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Then why should I pack?’

  ‘Because,’ Dad clears his throat. It’s a hollow sound. ‘You’re leaving.’

  ‘Leaving?’

  Water splashes from the bucket into the sink.

  ‘Let’s face it, a place across the road’s not going to work. If your mother hadn’t … well, all things being equal, there’s no point. For a start I can’t find anywhere to keep my motorbike and ladders.’ His voice trails away.

  ‘So where are we going?’

  ‘I’ve … um … I’ve got myself a job down Devon working for Ted Heathman. There’s a cottage with it.’

  ‘So we’re moving to Devon. Why didn’t you say something? I would have liked to have been asked.’ I’m too numb with grief to feel any real irritation.

  ‘You're not coming.’ Unusually, Dad's voice can barely be heard above the water he’s again begun to run.

  ‘Not going?’

  ‘You’re still in the middle of that secretarial course and, anyhow, what life is it for a young girl in the middle of nowhere away from all her friends. It's all right for a holiday but not for good, and especially since I hear young Damielle’s married now. Bloody silly getting hitched so young, if you ask me.’

  ‘So where do you suggest I go?’

  ‘I've asked your Aunt Min to put you up. At least you'll be away from the nosey buggers round here and their wagging tongues.’

  ‘Aunt Min! You can't mean it. I won't go!’ I thought I’d never be able to cry another tear; that every single one had been used up. Now they trickle down my cheeks in rivulets, and run into my mouth.

  Dad continues wringing water from his leather. ‘Now don't carry on.’ He says it almost reasonably.

  I hold my head in my hands. How much more can I take? I’m going mad. It runs in the family.

  At last Dad wipes his hands on his overalls and faces me. ‘Look, I don’t want you losing another opportunity.’

  ‘You don't want me because what Mum said was true, and you know it. You don't have to take any responsibility for me because there's no blood tie between us.’ I begin running from the kitchen back to my room.

  ‘Don’t be so ridiculous. Your mother was mad. Why take the word of a lunatic?’

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘It's all for the best,’ Dad calls through my closed bedroom door, but I burrow under my eiderdown so that I can’t hear him.

  It’s the day we’re due to move from our flat. I neither want to stay nor go. The suitcase is still outside my bedroom door empty.

  ‘Come on, get a move on. Start getting this thing packed.’ Dad throws the case through the half open door and onto my bed. Rust from the suit case catches marks my eiderdown.

  I stand at the window and instead of the Cigar Box Kingdom, I see Tony the morning after Fred and Lori’s wedding, running across the road to the bombsite, racing round and round, crying. I remember us sitting together in the dugout by the old fireplace. In the end we’d both been abandoned. Blountmere Street had kicked both of us out.

  ‘Are you or are you not going to put your things in this case?’ Dad’s mounting impatience does nothing to motivate me, and he goes to my drawers and begins flinging my clothes on the bed. ‘If you don’t want to walk around starkers, you’d better put these in your case now.’ His eyes are small beads that seem threaded on to his mottled face.

  I shamble across to my wardrobe, pull my few remaining clothes from their hangers, screw them into balls and wedge them into the case. Then I run my hand across the top of my dressing table so that all the knick knacks I’d once treasured clatter into the bag Dad has just given me. I can hear them smashing as I do so, and Dad grabs the bag from me and says, ‘Get going. I’ll do the rest.’

  I merely take one step after another. Ignoring all the other rooms I go straight to the front door. I stand on the door step and once again I see the bombsite on a spring day dappled with light, while Dad brings out the suitca
se and several boxes. I walk down the path. I don’t look back as he closes the door behind him.

  ‘Hi!’ Herbie is a blurred figure standing across the road. ‘D’you need a hand with anything, Mr Dibble?’ he asks, and Dad replies, ‘Get the girl in the sidecar, will you?’

  I barely register Herbie taking hold of me and half lifting me in. He tries to push me into the front compartment, but it’s Mum’s and I resist, struggling to get in my small space at the back. He’s talking to me and I think he says he’ll come and see me when I’m settled in. I wonder how he knows where I’m going.

  Once I’m inside and he’s shut the sidecar door, Herbie retreats to the pavement and waves to me, but my arms won’t move to make a response.

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ Dad tells him. ‘It’s all for the best.’

  Aunt Min is waiting when I arrive. She runs down the path, wiping her hands on her black apron and calls, ‘Here she is: my precious suffering angel.’ She plants a series of sparrows’ pecks on my cheeks.

  Dad unloads the boxes and the suitcase from the sidecar, while I sit on Aunt Min’s doorstep. All my strength has been sapped from me by my grief.

  Aunt Min doesn’t invite Dad in and he stoops over me and says, ‘Right, then, I'll be off.’ He kisses me, awkwardly aiming for my cheek. He misses and catches my ear. ‘You be a good girl for your aunt,’ he says. ‘You got everything you need?’

  I shrug.

  ‘Right, then, I'll be off,’ he repeats and begins walking to the road. There’s an air of relief about him as he kicks the motor bike into life.

  Being cradled, having my hair stroked, and Aunt Min's murmured endearments of “My poor precious” and “My broken-hearted darling” are strangely comforting. They demand nothing from me. It doesn't matter that Aunt Min serves up onions with every meal, or that the odour in the poky flat equals that of Miss Selska's camphorated oil. It doesn't matter that I have to climb over a dozen boxes in order to get into bed or that Aunt Min screams dementedly in the night. Nothing matters.

  I can’t remember much of the months immediately after Mum’s passing, or if I can, my memories are indistinct as if I’m recalling everything through gauze. I wonder how things have actually come about when I’ve contributed so little to the process. I couldn’t say when I began to awaken to my surroundings, like an animal coming out of hibernation. As with most of nature, things happen gradually, while the realisation is immediate. All at once I’m aware my bedroom is festooned with cobwebs and that my bedspread is stained and ragged like a piece of used blotting paper. On an old table next to my bed is a photograph of Mum and me stretching on the sand at Smuggler’s Cove. I remember Dad taking it with his ancient Brownie box camera. Aunt Min complains about it every time she comes into my bedroom. ‘If it wasn’t for your father’s insistence you have it in your room, I’d never have a photo of my wicked sister in my house,’ she asserts.

  And there’s the blur of Herbie’s visits when he’d sat next to me on Aunt Min’s sagging sofa, reading to me, telling me jokes, stroking my hands, kissing my cheeks. Had he really come three times a week, as he said he had? How had he known where to come? How had anyone of them known?

  A tattered recollection shimmers under my eyelids of Bill calling and mutely holding both my hands. He weeps, while Aunt Min fusses around asking, ‘Aren’t you the boy who used to lived next to us in Whitely Square?’

  In segments, I give residence in my mind to more merciful recollections of Mum, the real one, not the insane imposter, the bogus Lily Dibble who had inveigled her way into Mum’s place. Mum sewing and gardening, pickling and ironing. Mum folding me in her lap on winters’ nights while the fire crackled and smoked, and Dad, still wearing his cap, sat in his armchair reading The Star. Echoes of Mum singing ‘You are my heart’s delight’, while she peeled potatoes at the sink. Silky soft memories, always provoking a need for more.

  ‘It's a real tonic to see you looking better. There were times I visited when I swear you didn't know I was here. We've all been really worried about you, honest we have,’ Angela says on a day when my eyes seem to have opened wider and are more than just slits.

  Scared I was going the same way as Mum, I supposed.

  Angela continues, ‘D'you know, it must be months since you set foot in our place. I think Bill's quite upset about it. He was heart-broken about your mother. After she died, he stayed in his flat for a week, didn't put a toe outside the door, not even to go down to the shop, just left it all to me. They must have been good friends - Bill and his wife and your Mum and Dad.’ She looks at me in the enquiring way she has when she is trying to extract a secret from me. ‘Funny I never saw them visit your place. When they were young, was it? It would have had to be a big bust up between the four of them for Bill not to go to the funeral. He's not one to hold grudges. You don’t think there was something going on between Bill and your Mum, do you? You know a bit of hanky panky. After all your Dad isn’t, well … you know. Not that I’m one to speak ill of the dead.’

  ‘Of course there wasn’t anything going on. I don’t know how you could think like that. Mum would never have …’

  Angela hastens to change the subject. ‘I'm glad I didn't bring Maria with me, this fog isn't good for anyone's lungs, let alone a child’s.’

  November! It’s suddenly become November, and once again Angela and I are out shopping together. Although it is only midday, the shops are all fully lighted.

  ‘I've got to go to the butcher’s to get some rabbit. Mum and Old Selska are partial to rabbit. Personally, I can take it or leave it, but seeing as Selska's going back to Germany, I suppose we ought to give her a bit of a treat. She's not a bad old soul.’

  We continue on towards Chinkley’s Department Store looming from the fog like a phantom castle.

  ‘Fancy a cuppa? We haven't been shopping together for months’

  Inside Chinkley’s canteen, Angela unwinds her scarf and drapes it over the back of her chair. ‘So how are things going with you and your Aunt Min? She’s a funny old girl, but she dotes on you.’

  ‘It’s all right, though I think she's finding it harder than she expected. She's always lived alone, or at least since she was about twenty. She's never been married or had any children, so she's made a bit of a life for herself, and I don't fit into it.’

  ‘D’you mean she's got a lover?’

  ‘Not a lover! The words “Aunt Min” and “lover” don’t belong together. But she's used to going to housie or the Red Cross social nights. Then one night a week she goes with her friend Myrtle to the pictures and to the church Sunday night service. All in all, she's out every night of the week, not that I care, but she gets herself worked up about it and thinks she shouldn't be leaving me. Even when I persuade her to go she feels guilty and carries on about it all the next day.’ I look towards the windows at the fog that cocoons us. The truth, I suspect, is that Aunt Min’s frightened to leave me alone for fear I’ll do what Mum did.

  ‘And then there are the onions, and the rubbish in my bedroom and the fact that she finds the smallest change a huge issue.’ I pause. ‘I shouldn't be going on like this. Aunt Min’s all right, really.’

  ‘If you can't tell me, who can you tell?’ Angela replies. ‘I didn't mean to bring things up about your Mum, you know ... ’

  ‘It's all right.’ My real Mum’s been gone a long time and the bogus one hadn't ever listened. Sometimes I think Dad – I still haven’t found another title for him - listened better than Mum ever had. Then there were those times - so, so many times, when he hadn't heard Mum or me at all.

  ‘All of this is why I came to see you,’ Angela tells me.

  ‘You wanted to talk to me about Aunt Min and her onions and the boxes in my bedroom?’

  ‘Sort of,’ Angela brushes the sugar from her doughnut off the front of her coat.

  ‘With Old Selska going, we'll have a spare room, so why don't you come and live with us? Mum and Maria would love it. And Bill's said it'll be all right.�
��

  ‘Was it Bill's suggestion?’

  ‘No, it was mine, why? What difference does it make whose suggestion it was? It's a blinkin' marvellous idea. If you ask me, it couldn't be better. So what d'you think?’

  ‘I don't know. I’ll have to think about it.’

  ‘What’s to think about? Don't you want to live with all of us? Bill will have your bedroom decorated any colour you like and …’

  ‘Did he say that?’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘He'd decorate my bedroom any colour I wanted.’

  ‘He may have. Who cares who said it! Honestly, Paula, what is this with you and Bill? I thought you two got on like a house on fire.’

  ‘We did. I mean, we do.’

  ‘What's the problem, then?’

  The problem is I no longer know who Bill is. For that matter I don’t know who I am. Perhaps I never have.

  ‘Thanks, and I’ll definitely think about it.’ What’s to think about? Until I finish secretarial college and get a job, there isn’t anywhere else to live. I have no money, only the postal order for five pounds that Dad sends every month. It’s never accompanied by a letter. Recently I’ve thought of turning up in Devon and insisting he take me in. But since he’s been gone, he’s only written once. It was on a picture postcard of Newton Abbot and on the back he’d written three stilted lines saying he hoped I was all right and telling me to look after myself. He’d stretched his writing to the end of the card so that he didn’t have to sign it.

  Damielle had written saying Dad seemed to have settled, and was a great help to her father, although he kept himself to himself.

  The letter I’ve recently began writing to him is still not finished.

  ‘What is there to think about?’ Angela persists.

  I hesitate. I haven’t told Angela that only this morning Aunt Min had said that, although I would always be her “poor preciouskins”, if those friends of mine who live across The Common want to take me in, she wouldn’t stop me from moving.

  ‘All right, I’ll come, and thanks.’ What choice do I have?