by Annie Groves
She put her key in the front door and unlocked it, stepping into the hall, and then stopping as she heard the sound of voices coming from the kitchen. Her mother’s, and Mrs Brown’s, and…and Glen’s voice: the voice she had been hearing in her dreams at night and her longings during the day as she clung to every tender word he had said to her. Now she was hearing it here; but she couldn’t be!
Feeling dizzy with disbelief, her legs trembling as though they were about to give way, she hurried down the narrow hallway – where her father’s coat still hung on its peg under the stuffed deer’s head, with its branching antlers – and pushed open the door to the back parlour, her eyes widening at the scene in front of her.
Her mother, her face flushed with happiness, was seated at one side of the small, square table, whilst Glen was seated opposite her with Mrs Brown at the other side. There were tea cups on the table and what looked like a large slab of fruit cake with proper icing on it.
It was Glen who saw her first, breaking off from something he had been saying to her mother to get up clumsily, the tips of his ears betraying his nerves as he looked at her.
‘There you are, Glen! Here she is. I told you she wouldn’t be long,’ Ruthie could hear their neighbour saying chirpily before she turned to Ruthie and told her, with an arch look, ‘Just look who has come looking for you, Ruthie. Been here over an hour, he has, waiting impatiently to see you. Entertained your mum and me a treat, he has, telling us all about his family in America.’
‘Oh, Ruthie, why didn’t you tell me about you and Glen?’ her mother chimed in reproachfully. ‘I apologise for my daughter, Glen. I dare say she wanted to keep you to herself for a little while before she brought you home to meet us, although her dad would have had something to say about that. He wouldn’t have liked at all her seeing you without him knowing. I wish you could have met him, Glen…’ Tears had started to fill her mother’s eyes.
‘There, Mrs Philpott, don’t you go taking on now,’ Mrs Brown was comforting Ruthie’s mother whilst Glen was also insisting, ‘It isn’t Ruthie’s fault. You mustn’t blame her. Like I was telling you, I would have come in and introduced myself to you after the dance on Saturday, but it was getting late and I didn’t want to end up getting put on a charge and being confined to camp.’
Ruthie couldn’t stop looking at him. She wanted to fill her hungry gaze with the sight of him and go on filling it.
When he came towards her, all she could do was offer him a tremulous half-smile as he took hold of both her hands, squeezing them emotionally.
There was so much she wanted to say to him and so much too she needed to know. Like why he was here after the way he had turned his back on her and walked away.
‘I’ll tell you what, Mrs Philpott,’ Mrs Brown was saying warmly to her mother, ‘why don’t we let these two young ones go for a bit of a walk together whilst you and me get on with clearing up?’
‘But Ruthie hasn’t had her tea yet,’ her mother objected in that little-girl voice that Ruthie had learned to recognise and dread.
‘It’s all right, Mum. I had something to eat before I came home,’ Ruthie fibbed quickly, hating herself for the small deceit but knowing that it was necessary if she was to have the opportunity she desperately needed to talk privately with Glen.
Mrs Brown gave her an approving look, and urged, ‘Off you go then, you two, whilst me and your mam clear up and have a bit of a natter.’
‘Oh, but I want Glen to stay,’ Ruthie’s mother was protesting.
‘He’ll be coming back once he and your Ruthie have had a bit of a chat,’ Mrs Brown soothed her firmly. ‘It’s nearly time for that wireless programme you like, and I reckon that since Glen has bin so generous and bought you such a lovely slab of fruit cake that we might put the kettle on and have another slice.’
‘Oh, yes. I like fruit cake. It was always Mr Philpott’s favourite – did I tell you that?’
It seemed an age before Ruthie and Glen were finally outside, and she was able to release the anxious breath she had been holding. She had determinedly put at least a foot between herself and Glen as they stepped into the Close, but when he reached for her hand, clasping it in his own, she didn’t resist. His hand was so large compared with hers – so very large, in fact, that her hand was lost in it. Lost and yet at the same time somehow so very, very safe.
‘It wasn’t true what you said to my mother, was it?’ she asked him quietly, unable to look at him, and instead studying the tired dullness of the shabby pavement. ‘About not coming in with me, I mean.’
‘No.’
Relieved tears stung her eyes. She would have hated it if he had lied to her.
‘It was because of Mum, wasn’t it?’ she continued in a low voice.
Immediately his hand tightened on hers.
‘I…I can understand what you must have thought when…when you saw her like that. It’s Dad’s death that did it. She was never like this before. They were so close, you see,’ she explained earnestly, ‘and she depended on him so much. The doctor says that she’s gone this way because she just can’t bear him not being here any more. She knows that he’s gone really but sometimes she has to…to pretend that he hasn’t.’ She felt another squeeze on her hand.
‘I…I would have told you.’ Somehow it was important that she made him understand that, and that he didn’t think that she was the kind of girl who would have kept something so important from him. ‘I don’t blame you for walking away like you did, but—’
‘I wanted to stay,’ Glen interrupted her gruffly, ‘but I kinda thought that you didn’t want me there, and then there was your mom. I guess I was afraid that having a stranger around might upset her even more. My dad had this cousin – she’s dead now, God rest her soul – well, she was more of a second cousin really. When she was little she and her kid brother used to play a game of dare, running across the lines down at the railyard where her pa worked, only one day little Joey got his foot caught, and they couldn’t get him out in time. She was fine most of the time, but every now and again she’d get it into her head to go down to the railyard to look for him. Some folks round our town used to reckon she was off her head.’
Ruthie winced.
‘But my mom always used to say that it was God’s way of shielding her from her own pain, and that you never knew what something like that would do to you unless you had to go through it. I guess, in a kinda way, your mom feels the same about your dad as Cousin Laura did about Joey.’
Ruthie made a small choking sound of agreement through the tears that were streaming down her face.
‘Aw…sweetheart, don’t…’ Glen begged her rawly. ‘I can’t bear to see you cry.’
‘I can’t help it,’ Ruthie sobbed. ‘Your poor cousin. What a truly dreadful thing to have happened, Glen. At least my mother had all those years with my dad. Some days, though, she’s worse than others. The doctor says that he doesn’t know whether or not she’ll ever get properly well,’ she admitted.
Glen squeezed her hand again, and gave her an understanding look before saying, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch before now, but I was waiting for this to arrive.’ As he spoke he released her hand to reach into his jacket pocket for an envelope, which he handed to her.
‘What is it?’ Ruthie asked uncertainly without taking it.
‘It’s a letter from my folks, welcoming you to the family,’ he told her quietly. ‘You know I said that I wrote to them telling them that I’d found the girl I wanted to marry?’
Ruthie nodded disbelievingly.
‘Well, I knew they’d write back, and Mom put this letter for you in with mine. She said to tell you that you’re to write back and send her some photographs so that she can get to know you ready for when the war is over and I take you home with me.’
‘Oh, Glen.’ Fresh tears filled her eyes and flooded down her cheeks. She had felt so lost and broken-hearted these last few days. They had showed her how deep her feelings for him were, but they had
also showed her something else. Something that hadn’t really mattered when she had thought he had walked away from her, but which mattered very much now. All the more so in the light of what he had just been saying to her about his mother.
‘Aren’t you going to open Mom’s letter?’ he urged her.
‘I can’t marry you, Glen,’ Ruthie told him miserably. ‘I just can’t.’
‘You can’t say that,’ he protested. ‘You don’t mean it. You love me. I can see it in your eyes.’
She shook her head. ‘That doesn’t matter. At least it does, because I know I will never ever love anyone else. Oh, Glen, don’t,’ she protested breathlessly, but without any real conviction or denial in her voice when he took hold of her and tugged her into the protective shadow of an overhanging tree and kissed her fiercely.
‘You love me. You’ve just said so,’ he told her thickly when he had stopped. ‘And I sure as hell love you.’
‘I know,’ Ruthie agreed wretchedly, ‘but can’t you see? I can’t marry you and go back with you to America when the war’s over, Glen. What would happen to my mum?’
They had walked as far as the allotments and although she tried to object when Glen pushed open the gate that led to them she still let him walk her through it and down to a small wooden bench he had spied from the road.
‘We shouldn’t be here,’ she protested. ‘It’s Mr Taylor’s allotment and—’
‘There’s no one here, and if this Mr Taylor should come and ask us to leave, then I’ll explain to him that I needed somewhere to talk to my girl. The only girl for me, Ruthie, because that is what you are.’
She could feel herself trembling as he wound his fingers between her own and then clasped his in her palm.
‘Handfast, my mom told me this is called,’ he whispered to her. ‘It’s what people used to do if there was no church for them to be married in. Don’t worry about your mom. We’ll take her with us.’
Ruthie gazed up at him. ‘Can we do that?’ she breathed unsteadily.
‘Sure we can,’ he told her firmly. ‘Now promise me there won’t be any more talk about you not marrying me, and then read my mom’s letter.’
‘Yes, Glen,’ Ruthie told him demurely, before exclaiming in delighted shock, ‘Glen, no, you mustn’t kiss me, not here!’
‘Then quit looking at me like that,’ he told her, ignoring her command, to take her in his arms and kiss her very thoroughly indeed.
Naturally it was quite some time before she came back down to earth enough to open Glen’s mother’s letter, reading it slowly and with growing joy, breaking off every now and then, to exclaim, ‘Oh, Glen, your mother has written the kindest things, about how she can’t wait to meet me and to welcome me properly into your family. Oh, and look, she says that she’s going to send me some photographs of you when you were a baby, and she asks if I will send her some of me. Oh, Glen…I’ll write back to her tonight,’ she vowed emotionally. ‘How kind she is, Glen, to welcome me, a stranger, like this, as though she loves me already.’
‘Of course she loves you already. She knows that I love you,’ Glen told her sturdily. ‘She sent me this too,’ he added, reaching into his jacket and suddenly looking both very serious and at the same time very bashful. ‘It was my grandmother’s.’ He opened the small box and showed Ruthie an old ring with a small diamond. ‘She gave it to me before she died and told me that it was for my wife-to-be. I guess it’s a bit old-fashioned-looking, and maybe you’d rather have something different…but—’
‘Oh, no, Glen,’ Ruthie assured him fervently. ‘I love it.’
She did not know whose hand was trembling the more when he slipped the ring onto her finger. It looked so narrow that she held her breath, half afraid that it would be too small, but to her relief it fitted her finger perfectly.
‘There,’ Glen said triumphantly. ‘We’re engaged now, Ruthie. Nothing can part us now. Just as soon as I can arrange it, you and me are going to be married. Come on.’ He got up and, reaching out, drew her to her feet. ‘We’d better get back and tell your mom.’
‘Oh, Glen, I still can’t believe this is happening. I never thought I would ever be this happy,’ Ruthie told him, looking down at her hand where the tiny diamond was reflecting all the colours of the rainbow through her happy tears.
‘Well now, engaged, is it?’ Mrs Brown beamed. ‘I must say that I can’t say that I’m surprised. I had my suspicions right from the first time Ruthie met you, Glen, and I told my hubby as much, didn’t I, Joe?’ she asked her husband, who had been summoned from his allotment and commanded to bring a bottle of elderberry wine with him to toast the newly engaged couple.
‘And Glen says that Mum will be able to come to America with us. Oh, and, Mrs Brown, you should see the lovely letter Glen’s mother has sent to me, telling me that she knows already that she’s going to love me because Glen does.’
‘Well, I should think she will love you, an’ all, Ruthie lass. A good girl you are and allus have been.’
‘Glen wants us to get married as soon as we can. But he’ll have to get permission from the army first.’
‘It’s time we had a wedding in the Close. And think on, young man,’ Mrs Brown warned Glen, giving him a serious look, ‘in love or not, and war or not, there’s to be no hanky-panky goes on before the pair of you are wed, otherwise Mr Brown will have something to say to you, just like Ruthie’s dad would have done if he’d been alive.’
Ruthie blushed peony pink, and then gazed adoringly up at Glen when he told her neighbour with great dignity, ‘Ruthie’s going to be my wife and there’s no way I’d ask her to do anything her folks wouldn’t like, or that we couldn’t tell our own kids about when they’re grown.’ He turned to Ruthie and gave her a look that, as she told him half an hour later when she had been allowed to go to the front gate with him to say good night properly, had made her tingle all the way down to her toes.
SEVENTEEN
Diane put down her hairbrush and turned to stare at Myra in angry disbelief.
‘I can’t believe you’re even thinking about risking doing something like this. Not after last time.’
Myra gave a dismissive shrug and lit a fresh cigarette. It was no business of Diane’s what she did but she had her own reasons for telling her about her plans to spend a weekend in London with Nick.
‘What risk? There isn’t one. I’ve got a legitimate weekend pass coming up, and a week’s holiday left to take, so what’s to stop me spending it in London, if I want?’
‘You’re a married woman with a husband,’ Diane pointed out grimly. ‘And if you think I’m going to cover for you a second time if he comes home and catches you out you’ve got another think coming.
‘I’m not asking you to cover for me. I’m just asking you to lend me your silk blouse,’ Myra told her, drawing on her cigarette. ‘Honestly, from the fuss you’re making anyone would think that Jim was your ruddy brother or something. Look, my marriage is over. Jim knows that – I’ve told him often enough. It might be a good thing if he did turn up and find out I’m with Nick. He’d have to accept that I’d drifted then.’ she said bluntly, using the forces’ slang for a woman who was unfaithful to her husband in his absence.
‘I don’t know why you’re doing this, Myra, not when you’ve got a decent man like Jim,’ Diane protested.
‘No, I dare say you don’t,’ Myra agreed, stubbing out her cigarette without finishing it. ‘Women like you never do. But I’m not like you, Diane. I want better than what I’ve got here. I want more from life than a “decent husband”. I’ve always wanted more. I want to live like they do in the films.’
‘But, Myra, that’s just in the films—’
‘No, it isn’t. That’s how it is in America. Anyway, how would you know? Who the hell would really want to live here if they didn’t have to?’ Myra demanded angrily. ‘You’ve only got to listen to the Americans to know what they think of us and this country. They’re used to better and they don’t mind saying so.�
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‘Bragging about it, you mean,’ Diane corrected her, tight-lipped.
‘You can call it bragging if you want. I call it speaking out and saying it like it is. Nick can give me everything I’ve ever wanted. A new life in America, as his wife.’
‘You’re already someone else’s wife. Have you told him that?’
‘My marriage is over,’ Myra repeated, ignoring her question. ‘Probably isn’t even a proper marriage in America, anyway,’ she added dismissively. ‘They do things differently over there,’ She gave Diane a hard-edged look as though daring her to contradict her.
She couldn’t possibly believe that, surely, Diane thought, but she could see that there wasn’t any point in trying to reason with her.
‘So can I borrow your blouse, then?’ Myra pressed her. ‘Only Nick said as how he was going to book us into this posh hotel.’
Diane didn’t really care for the idea of her best blouse being used as an accessory to adultery but the war had brought a new mood of pulling together and sharing what was available, and even though she couldn’t approve of what Myra was doing, neither could she refuse her.
‘I suppose so,’ she agreed reluctantly.
Somehow the summer air seemed to accentuate the shabbiness of the city and its people, Diane thought as she made her way down Edge Hill Road, past bombed-out buildings and a church with the now familiar notice pinned outside asking people to donate money ‘to buy a sick child a banana’. No wonder their American allies were so critical and contemptuous of the country and the people they were boasting openly they had come to save. And no wonder too that those who had lived through so much within that country felt bitter and angry when they heard those boastful comments. She felt a small pang for Myra and then quickly dismissed it – she was still behaving terribly.