by Maureen Lee
‘Would you like to come in for a minute?’
‘No, thank you. I only came to remind you.’
Kathleen offered to come early and help get things ready, but Rachel said she could manage on her own. ‘It’s only coffee and I made some fairy cakes first thing this morning.’ She dropped her eyes and ran her fingers through her untidy hair. ‘I’m sorry about yesterday. It was just when I heard that little girl in the next cubicle. She reminded me of Alice. She used to tell me how beautiful I was. So did Kirsty and James when they were little, but now they think I’m just a mess.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ Kathleen protested.
‘It is,’ Rachel said flatly. ‘Well, I won’t hold you up any longer. I’ll see you later, shall I?’
‘I’m looking forward to it.’
‘Who was that?’ Steve asked when Kathleen closed the door and went into the kitchen where they’d been having a late breakfast.
‘Rachel. She’s invited me for coffee.’ She looked at him, eyes narrowed, daring him to say something offensive about her new friend, but he didn’t speak. ‘I won’t be gone long,’ she added, resenting that she felt slightly guilty for leaving a grown man by himself.
‘Take as long as you like. I shouldn’t have said anything yesterday. I suppose I was just worried about you – and I missed you.’
‘Anna will be at the coffee morning. Why don’t you go round and see Ernie?’ she suggested. ‘He’ll be on his own too.’
Steve smiled. ‘There’s no need to find me a playmate, luv. I’ll go for a walk, buy meself a newspaper. D’you know we’re not far from Penny Lane? The girls’ll be tickled pink when I tell them I’ve been there.’ He groaned and made a face. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that. It just slipped out without me thinking. For the moment, I’d forgotten they’d grown up.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘Who was that on the phone last night?’ he asked casually. ‘I seem to remember you were speaking to someone when I came in.’
She wasn’t prepared to lie. ‘It was Michael.’
‘I see.’ He nodded and looked grim.
‘I doubt if you do,’ she said shortly. ‘After the things you’d said earlier, I needed someone to talk to. There was no one else but him.’
‘What happens if I need someone to talk to?’
‘Oh, don’t be so childish, Steve.’ She went over to the sink and began to wash the breakfast dishes when there was a crash behind her. When she looked, startled, Steve had swept the milk jug off the table with a single sweep of his big hand.
‘Don’t you dare call me childish!’ he said in a low, grating voice she’d never heard before, his face ugly with rage. ‘I’m fed up being treated like a kid. Last night, I was just trying to explain how I felt. I was being honest with you. I thought you’d understand.’
‘Understand?’ Kathleen cried. ‘Understand when you tell me that Jean’s part of you? How do you think that makes me feel? I want to be part of you. I want … oh, I don’t know what I want.’ She burst into tears, hating herself for it, knowing how easily he was moved by tears – it was Jean’s tears that were calling him back home and she didn’t want to play his wife’s game. ‘I’m so mixed up. I don’t know what you want either. Perhaps we should never have come away together.’
‘Don’t say that!’ His rage vanished as quickly as it had come and he pulled her on to his knee. ‘I’m mixed up too.’ He buried his head in her shoulder. ‘I don’t know whether I’m coming or going,’ he said in a muffled voice. ‘I’m sick of us fighting.’
Kathleen sniffed. ‘So am I.’
‘I love you.’
‘And I love you.’
He stroked her face. ‘Let’s not fight any more. I promise never to mention Jean again.’
‘And I promise not to ring Michael.’ She remembered that, in September, their son had invited them to Denmark for the weekend, but September was a long way off. She’d cross that bridge when she came to it.
‘Did you notice,’ Anna said to the assembled women, ‘that the curtains are up in the empty bungalow?’
Everyone said they hadn’t, apart from Rachel who told them a woman had come round the night before to borrow a torch.
‘She’d forgotten to bring one and it was dark and she couldn’t find where to switch the electricity on. Her name’s Donna Moon and the house isn’t hers, but her mother-in-law’s – she’s moving in tomorrow. The furniture’s coming this morning and Donna will be back to see to it. I invited her for coffee, but she said she’d be too busy.’
The conversation turned to mothers-in-law. Sarah Rees-James had never met hers. ‘Alex had a big family somewhere in London, but they never saw each other. Maybe he was ashamed of them – or they were ashamed of him. Now I’ll never know.’
Rachel told them Frank’s mother had put him into care and had had nothing to do with him since. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to meet her,’ she said with a little shudder.
‘My first husband’s mother was a really charming person,’ Kathleen said, feeling obliged to contribute towards the discussion. ‘She died two years ago and I was terribly upset. Steve’s mother was already dead when I met him. Steve and I only recently married,’ she added for the benefit of anyone who hadn’t already heard the lie she’d told.
Marie Jordan didn’t contribute towards the conversation, Kathleen noticed. She seemed very uptight, as if something was troubling her. Victoria wasn’t married and didn’t have a mother-in-law, and Anna said she hadn’t met hers either. ‘Though I would have loved to. According to Ernie, she was a wonderful person, but they lost touch during the war.’
‘Is that when you met Ernie, in the war?’ Rachel enquired.
‘Yes, in Cairo.’ Anna’s eyes glowed. ‘We stayed in Cairo for years afterwards, and then moved to the South of France. We also spent time in Paris and Rome – we even lived for a while in Las Vegas. Ernie used to be an inveterate gambler.’
‘He doesn’t look like a gambler,’ Kathleen remarked. ‘He gives the impression of being a very cautious man.’
‘Oh, he is, he is,’ Anna trilled. ‘He’s a very cautious gambler. Have any of you ever been in a casino?’ Everyone shook their heads, enthralled by the turn the conversation had taken. ‘Well,’ Anna went on, ‘you probably don’t know that in roulette you can bet on a number the ball lands in, or you can bet on the colour. Ernie always put his chips on the black, knowing the ball was bound to end up on black eventually. If it didn’t, he’d double his stake, then double it again if he lost. One night,’ Anna paused for a dramatic breath, ‘one night, the ball landed on red nine times in a row. Now Ernie’s not the sort to get all hot and bothered, but that night his hands were shaking. He’d started off with a thousand francs, but now he’d have to stake – I can’t work out how much it would be,’ she said, fretful all of a sudden.
‘Just over five hundred thousand.’ Kathleen was good at mental arithmetic.
‘Half a million francs,’ Sarah gasped. ‘How much is that in English money?’
‘I don’t know,’ Anna confessed. ‘The exchange rate was very different in those days; there were hundreds and hundreds of francs to the pound. Anyway, all our money had gone, every penny. Poor Ernie was shattered, so I did no more than turn to the woman next to me and offer to exchange my ruby necklace for her chips. She didn’t hesitate – she knew she was getting a bargain – so I threw the chips on the black square and we won.’
The women uttered a relieved sigh, and Victoria said in wonder, ‘You actually had a ruby necklace?’
‘I did indeed,’ Anna said boastfully.
‘I bet Ernie never went near a casino again for a long time,’ Rachel commented.
‘Oh, no, dear. We just went to the bar and had a drink – champagne, if I remember rightly – and he was back at the tables within an hour.’
‘Wow!’ Sarah gasped. ‘We used to spend holidays in the South of France when I was little. Daddy loved casinos, but he always lost.
Mummy used to get terribly cross with him. What a fantastic life you’ve led, Anna!’
Anna preened herself and Kathleen said, ‘And that’s not all. Before the war, she was an actress. Tell them about the film you made, Anna.’
‘Well,’ Anna began, only too willing, ‘I was only seventeen …’
By rights, Ernest’s ears should have been burning considering the amount of personal information his wife was conveying to the women across the way. Instead, inspired by the dream, he was thinking about his mother sitting in front of the fire in Chaucer Street, knitting needles moving backwards and forwards like pistons on an engine. He hadn’t ‘lost touch’, as Anna had put it. When he’d first got to North Africa, he’d written regularly to his mother, but his letters had got fewer and fewer and had stopped altogether when he met Anna. There was only room for one woman in his life and she was all he could think of.
By then, Ernest had changed, no longer the same naive, inexperienced nineteen-year-old who’d left Bootle what seemed like a hundred years ago. No way could he see himself going back, marrying Magdalene, and working in a chandler’s shop for the rest of his life – he wrote to Magdalene and told her. She didn’t reply and Mam’s painfully written, badly-spelt letters continued to arrive, but stopped after a while when he didn’t answer – she probably thought they weren’t reaching him.
He didn’t even go to see his family when he was demobbed at a base in Kent, not prepared to waste days of his time when all he wanted was to get back to Anna and their future together.
‘I was a bastard,’ Ernest told himself. ‘A selfish, unthinking bastard.’ He hadn’t even thought to contact Gaynor or Charlie when he returned to Liverpool with Anna ten years ago. Liverpool had been her idea, not his.
‘Let’s retire,’ she’d said. ‘Properly retire, go somewhere completely different and make new friends.’ Their old friends were dead or had retired themselves and the disease she had was getting worse. She was having more bad periods and fewer remissions. ‘I don’t want you pushing me around Monte Carlo or Paris in a wheelchair, Ernie. It would be too sad for words.’
He’d never forget the day Anna was told she had Multiple Sclerosis. It was like a death sentence. Ernest had thought he wouldn’t have her for much longer. Nearly thirty years later, she was still alive to entertain him every minute of every day.
They’d moved to Liverpool and it had taken ten years and a vivid dream to prompt Ernest into thinking about Mam and the brother and sister he’d left behind when he was barely out of his teens.
Gaynor and Charlie would be well into their sixties by now and could be anywhere in the world – Gaynor was likely to have married and changed her name. On impulse, he picked up the telephone directory and looked for Burtonshaw. There were only two and one had the initial ‘C’. Now all he had to do was pick up the phone and dial, but Ernest, usually a man of courage, couldn’t bring himself to do it. What would he say if he established that the C. Burtonshaw was his half-brother, Charlie? ‘Hello, this is Ernie. Nice talking to you again after sixty years. Sorry I didn’t get in touch sooner.’
He’d discuss it with Anna. She’d know what to do, she always did.
There was a loud, rumbling noise outside and when he looked a furniture van had driven into the square. It stopped outside the bungalow where curtains had been put up the night before. A row of curious faces appeared in the window of Rachel Williams’s house where the women were having coffee. Ernest grinned. What interest people found in other people’s furniture would always be a mystery to him.
After they’d tired of watching the removal men carry in Mrs Moon’s strangely painted furniture – apart from Kathleen who considered it degrading and had remained in her seat – Rachel refilled everyone’s coffee cups and brought in another plate of fairy cakes. Anna had exhausted herself and was listening for a change. She was a remarkable woman, Kathleen thought, very old and very ill, but with no intention of sinking into the background as other women in the same position might. She thrust herself forward, determined not to go unnoticed.
Having dealt with television and their favourite programmes, dismissed politics as dull and unworthy of discussion, and swapped their favourite recipes, Victoria was now telling them what the square used to look like before the houses had been built.
‘We just called it “the yard”, and it was an eyesore. Granddad had no head for business and the company just went down and down until it fizzled out altogether. I’ve photographs at home showing the place in all its glory, when it looked very smart, and an even earlier one when it was green and countrified. If I’d known you’d be interested, I’d’ve brought them with me.’
‘Perhaps we could have another coffee morning next week and you can show us then,’ Sarah Rees-James suggested. ‘We could have it in my house if you like, make it a regular event.’
‘I shall be starting work at the hospital in August,’ Kathleen told her. ‘I won’t be able to come then, but it would be nice to meet again next week.’
‘I’ll be looking for work as soon as the children go back to school,’ said Marie Jordan, ‘but I could come next week an’ all.’
‘I won’t be here next week,’ Victoria reminded them. ‘I’ll be in New York, having already started my new job. But don’t forget the barbecue on Saturday. I’ll be here for that.’
‘I’d forgotten you were leaving.’ Sarah looked at her glumly. ‘Tiffany will miss you terribly. And so will I, which is silly, because I hardly know you – that’s silly too, because I feel as if I’ve known you for ages.’
‘Our Danny will miss you too, Victoria,’ Marie put in, ‘me as well.’
‘We all will,’ said Rachel.
Anna remarked how sad she also would be to see Victoria go.
Victoria blushed. ‘There’s been times this week when I’ve wished I wasn’t leaving, but it’s too late to back out now. I might come home, you never know the way things will turn out, and I’m not selling the house, it’ll still be mine. If I do return, I wonder if you’ll all still be here by then?’
Gareth couldn’t concentrate on work that morning. His head was all over the place: one minute he was thinking about Victoria, next it was Debbie with whom he’d had a terrible row all to do with the planned holiday in Barbados. The travel agent had written wanting the balance in full – so far Gareth had only paid a deposit. He’d blanched when he saw the amount required.
‘We can’t afford this, Deb,’ he told her. ‘I’m not prepared to take on any more debts.’
‘Why not?’ Debbie tossed the pigtails that looked ludicrous on a 25-year-old: until now he’d considered them cute and sexy. ‘We can afford to pay it back.’
‘No, we can’t, Deb,’ he said patiently. ‘I did a calculation the other night. After I’ve paid instalments on all the loans, there’s hardly enough left for us to live on. The interest on top is horrendous and a complete waste of money. It would be madness to go on holiday. We’d need spending money: we’d get even deeper into debt. I’m going to ring the travel agent and cancel. It means losing the deposit, but that’s just too bad.’
‘You’ll do no such thing, Gareth Moran.’ Debbie stamped her foot and Tabitha, who’d been listening, his head going from one to the other as if he was watching a tennis match, turned in fright and ran upstairs. ‘I’m really looking forward to that holiday. I need a holiday. I’ve been working dead hard lately.’
‘If you need it all that much, then why don’t you pay for it.’
‘You know I don’t earn enough.’
‘Well, now you know that I don’t earn enough, not to pay for holidays in Barbados and fancy golf carts,’ Gareth responded angrily.
‘It’s not a golf cart, it’s a Prairie Dog.’ The little pointed jaw that he’d kissed so tenderly in the past dropped an inch. ‘Does that mean we’re not getting the Prairie Dog either?’
‘Not unless you buy it yourself, Deb.’
On the way to work in the Escort, he’d regretted saying
that, just in case she went out and bought the damn thing with her Goldfish card. She might even pay for the holiday as well. He thought of ringing Goldfish and telling them he wouldn’t be held responsible for his wife’s debts, but it seemed an awfully traitorous thing to do.
‘Have you gone deaf, man?’ Kevin enquired from the next desk. Kevin was the same age as him, earned the same wages, was married and had two kids, lived in a perfectly nice house with perfectly nice furniture, drove a newish car, and the only money he owed was to the Halifax for his mortgage. Gareth envied him tremendously. He was beginning to regret marrying Debbie. If they’d just continued to live together, everything would have been fine. It was getting a joint account that had been his undoing.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said to Kevin. ‘Did you say something?’
‘I said, “Are you going deaf?” and before that I asked if you’d like some posh nosh at lunchtime. It’s me birthday and I’m treating all youse guys to a meal.’
‘Count me in,’ Gavin said with a sigh. It might take his mind off things for a while.
Alastair, who’d been asleep in his pram outside Rachel’s back door, woke and began to cry. Sarah took him home for his midday meal, saying, ‘Danny’s babysitting Tiffany and Jack. He’ll have had enough by now.’
Marie said, ‘I’ll come with you,’ and Victoria announced she and Anna were going into town to buy a computer. ‘We’re having lunch first and Ernie will probably want to leave in about half an hour.’ She took Anna home, the older woman clinging to her arm. Only Rachel and Kathleen were left. Having the coffee morning was Rachel’s way of bravely trying to regain some normality in her life, but the effort had left her nervous wreck.
‘I think that went very well,’ Kathleen said warmly.
‘Do you? Frank says I’m a hopeless hostess. I force things on people and they feel obliged to take them just to please me.’
‘You were perfect,’ Kathleen assured her. ‘Everyone enjoyed themselves, I could tell, and I know I did. Isn’t Victoria sweet? I really liked her. I liked Sarah and Marie too,’ she added hastily, ‘and Anna is a real character.’