When the Lights Come on Again

by Maggie Craig

  ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, miss, there’s a war on. We can do what we damn well please.’

  Ten minutes later, Liz flung into the hospital looking for help - five minutes after her father had got there, in search of his missing daughter after she’d failed to come home the night before. His eyes reminded her of the policeman who’d just taken Mario away.

  They saw the same things he had: the hastily thrown-on clothes, the uncombed hair, the fact that she clearly hadn’t spent the night in the hospital. They made the same judgement.

  Thirty

  ‘So what happened after that?’ asked Helen in a tone of fascinated horror.

  ‘All hell broke loose,’ said Liz drily.

  ‘A wee bit of a scene?’

  ‘You might say that,’ said Liz, trying to sound bright and cheerful and totally in command of the situation. ‘I told him the truth.’

  ‘Och, Liz! Was that wise?’

  ‘I was fed up with all the lies, Helen. And I was so upset I wasn’t thinking straight.’ She shrugged. ‘So now I’m an ungrateful daughter, a loose woman, and I’ve broken my mother’s heart into the bargain. Not to mention being a cheap little tart.’

  Despite her bravado, her bottom lip wobbled. The expression her father had used had been a lot worse than that. In silent sympathy, Helen laid a comforting hand on her arm.

  ‘I’m never to darken his door again,’ said Liz flippantly. ‘Or words to that effect.’ Her voice shook. ‘And I’ve not to try to get in touch with my mother. He’s going to get her to pack my things in a couple of cases, and he’ll drop them off at the Infirmary.’

  A note of bleak bitterness crept into her voice. ‘Not at my grandfather’s house where I’m actually staying. He couldn’t bring himself to do that.’

  ‘Does your grandfather know what happened?’

  ‘Not the gory details. Only what happened to Mario and Mr Rossi, and that I’ve fallen out with my father.’

  Helen shook her head sadly. ‘Your poor mother,’ she said. “That’s her lost both her children. I’m so sorry, Liz.’

  The two girls sat in silence for a moment or two. Liz, lost and alone, had come home to Clydebank for solace. Not to Queen Victoria Row, of course. That wasn’t home any more. She’d gone to her grandfather, and to Helen. Peter had tactfully made himself scarce for an hour or two so that the girls could talk.

  ‘Are they going to let you see Mario?’

  Liz hunched her shoulders and wrapped her arms about herself. ‘I hope so. Adam and Cordelia are getting their families to pull all the strings they can think of.’ She looked at her friend. ‘Say a wee prayer to St Jude for me, Helen. And one for Mario and his father too.’

  He’d obviously slept in his clothes for the past two nights, and he was very pale and badly in need of a shave, but he was fit and unharmed and he was walking towards her with a typical Mario smile on his handsome face, his arms outstretched.

  ‘Liz...’

  ‘No touching,’ said the policeman. It wasn’t the sergeant who’d arrested Mr Rossi senior, but the one who’d come for Mario. The one who thought Liz was a loose woman. ‘One of you on either side of the table.’

  Their eyes fixed on each other, they slid into the hard chairs. As soon as she was within reach, Mario grasped her hands.

  ‘I said no touching,’ came the voice of authority.

  Mario tore his gaze away from Liz’s face and turned to look at the man. He sat on a chair at a small table at right angles to them and the table at which they sat. There was no other furniture in the dingy room.

  ‘Please, Officer. She’s my girl. I only want to hold her hand. Please?’ he asked again.

  The man shot Liz a look of disdain. She knew what it meant. He thought she was a trollop. So did her father. She tried not to let it make her angry. They didn’t know anything.

  ‘Very well,’ said the sergeant. ‘But that’s all. Do we understand each other?’

  ‘Perfectly,’ said Mario, lifting one dark eyebrow at Liz. I want to smother your face in kisses, that look said, but this numpty isn’t going to let me do it. ‘Eddie would love this, eh?’ he murmured. ‘The iron hand of the state.’

  ‘Speak clearly, please.’

  Liz closed her eyes briefly as she slid her hands into his. Funny to remember how she had once shrunk away from him. Now she would have let him touch her anywhere. That would shock the sergeant.

  ‘Is your father all right?’

  Mario shrugged. ‘As well as can be expected.’

  ‘Give him my love.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘What are they going to do with you? Do you know?’

  ‘They haven’t told us anything. But I’m going to do my damnedest to stay with my father so that I can look after him. Whatever happens.’

  Liz nodded. ‘How are you?’ she asked, putting as much feeling as she could into the simple question.

  ‘All the better for seeing you,’ he assured her, squeezing the hands he held. He ran his thumbs along her knuckles. ‘And enjoying certain memories of the other night.’

  Liz blushed and he laughed. The police officer coughed. Mario ignored him, his whole attention fixed on Liz.

  ‘What about you?’ he asked, his question also invested with deeper meaning. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said, answering his first question: How have you been since we made love? Then she dealt with the second one: How are you coping with this? She wouldn’t tell him about her father.

  ‘Everyone’s looking after me,’ she said, a catch in her voice. ‘Helen, my grandfather, Cordelia and Adam.’

  ‘Adam who?’ came a voice from the corner.

  Liz turned to look at the man. When she saw that he was making notes, she was outraged. Reading her reaction in her face, Mario gave her hands a warning squeeze.

  ‘If you make a fuss he’ll only throw you out,’ he muttered. ‘Adam Smith,’ he said in a louder voice. ‘He writes books. You’ll find his Wealth of Nations in the library at the Uni.’ He hadn’t taken his eyes off Liz. ‘We have good friends,’ he told her. He grinned, his teeth flashing white. ‘Even if some of them do belong to the aristocracy and the upper echelons of the bourgeoisie.’

  ‘Keep the conversation in English, please,’ came the voice of authority.

  ‘He was clearly puzzled by the fit of the giggles his request provoked in the dangerous enemy alien and his girlfriend,’ said Liz twenty minutes later as she sat in Adam’s car on the way to his mother’s house for a council of war on the Rossis’ case. He had picked her up from the police station and they were calling in for Cordelia on the way out to Milngavie.

  ‘Did they say if they would let you see him again?’ asked Adam.

  ‘They refused to say anything much,’ she said wearily, gazing out at the shops and the passers-by. ‘I’m so worried about Mr Rossi.’ She turned and gave Adam a tired smile. ‘And Mario too, of course.’

  He steered the car into a space in front of Cordelia’s house on Great Western Road and sounded the horn. The door opened almost immediately. She must have been watching for their arrival. Liz followed her slim figure as she ran down the front steps and came towards them.

  ‘It’s very good of you and Cordelia and your families to help. I’m so grateful to you all.’

  ‘What are friends for?’ asked Adam. He got out of the car to open the door for Cordelia.

  In the end, however, it didn’t matter how many strings were pulled by however many influential people. The invasion scare was at its height. The Italians were to be regarded as the enemy within, potential fifth columnists working behind the lines to pave the way for the German invasion.

  The state apparently could not afford to recognize that many of them were profoundly anti-fascist and were absolutely no threat at all to the war effort. On the contrary, hundreds of Italian families actually had sons serving in the British armed forces.

  Young and old, married and single, the men of Britain’s Ita
lian families were to be interned. The order came right from the top - from Winston Churchill himself. Some members of his war cabinet had asked if it wouldn’t be possible to distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. Churchill’s response was succinct. Collar the lot!

  The string-pulling achieved one thing for Liz and Mario - permission to say goodbye to each other. Adam drove her to the police station. When they got there he turned off the engine and asked if she would like him to come in with her.

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said gravely. ‘If you want me to.’

  The room was tiny, little more than a cell. Adam did his best to stand at a discreet distance from the lovers, but it was physically impossible for anyone in the room to be more than a few feet away from anyone else. Mario’s velvet eyes were soft and warm and full of the pain of farewell.

  ‘You’ve not to worry about me.’

  ‘Worry about you? Perish the thought.’ She was doing her best not to break down. She thought back to the night Eddie had taken his farewell of her and Helen.

  ‘I’ll be out dancing with Polish soldiers every night. I won’t have time to worry about you, Mr Rossi.’

  It was a gallant effort, but her voice was close to breaking.

  Mario’s smile was very tender. ‘Are you about to cry, Miss MacMillan?’

  Liz lifted her chin. ‘I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.’

  ‘That’s my girl.’

  ‘Time up,’ said the policeman, this time the sergeant who had come to arrest Aldo Rossi.

  Mario took Liz into his arms and embraced her passionately. Adam, the unwilling observer, coughed and studied the wall.

  ‘Let’s be having you then, son,’ said the policeman. He didn’t sound unkind.

  ‘Let me give her one last kiss, Sergeant,’ Mario pleaded. The policeman hesitated, then gave him a little nod.

  Now that the moment had come, Liz clung desperately to him, all her brave resolutions about letting him go without a tear crumbling into nothing.

  ‘Ti amo, Elisabetta,’ he whispered. ‘Amore mio.’

  The sergeant didn’t tell him to stick to English. Mario returned to that language himself.

  ‘Liz, Liz... you’ve got to let me go...’

  But she wasn’t responding to his words, only to his lips and his arms and the anguish of having to separate from him.

  Mario lifted his head. ‘Adam, will you take her, please?’

  She was being transferred from one set of supporting arms to another.

  ‘Look after her for me, old friend.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Adam. ‘Don’t worry about her, Mario. I’ll take care of her.’ His voice had gone husky,but he recovered himself. ‘I’ll not let her mope.’

  Over the top of her head, she felt Mario’s hand go out to squeeze Adam’s shoulder. It came back to rest briefly on her hair, like a benediction. Then he was gone.

  PART THREE

  1940-1941

  Thirty-one

  ‘Sorry! I was away in a dwam. Did you say something?’

  ‘The flicks,’ said Adam. He was half in and half out of the door, one hand lightly gripping the frame. ‘This afternoon. You’re off, aren’t you?’

  Liz nodded. She was a full-time auxiliary nurse at the Infirmary now, being paid a pittance and living at the nurses’ home. She had resigned from Murray’s when her father had kicked her out.

  Neither the low wages nor the restrictions on her freedom bothered her. Nothing much bothered her at the moment. Except Mario. And sometimes her mother - when she allowed herself to think about her.

  ‘But what about you?’ she asked Adam. He didn’t have much free time. Effectively doing a resident’s job, he was also studying hard for his finals next year. He came into the room and perched on the edge of the table at which she was checking the belongings of a patient about to be discharged, making sure everything tallied with the list made when the woman had been admitted.

  ‘Believe it or not, my dear girl, I’ve actually managed to get someone to cover for me this afternoon.’

  ‘What’s on at the pictures anyway?’ she asked, satisfied that everything was in order and glancing up at him.

  ‘Who cares?’

  Liz looked at him anxiously, hearing the note of something more than tiredness in his voice. He’d been so good to her since Mario had been taken away, keeping his promise not to let her mope. Cordelia Maclntyre had been kind, too.

  When news had come through at the beginning of July of the sinking of the Arandora Star, a ship carrying hundreds of Italian internees to prison camps in Canada, the two of them had held her hand, literally and metaphorically, for days. Over seven hundred men had drowned when the vessel was torpedoed by the same U-boat commander who had sunk the Royal Oak at Scapa Flow not long after the start of the war.

  Six anxious weeks later, a mysterious unsigned note with a Liverpool postmark had arrived for Liz care of the hospital. Your friend reached the other side of the water safely. That was all it said. It was enough. For a while at least.

  ‘Shall I make you a cup of tea?’ she asked Adam now. ‘You look all in.’

  ‘Work to be done before that.’ He pushed himself up off the table. ‘But thanks for the offer. Maybe later. I can’t remember when my last cup of tea was. Some hours ago, I believe.’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Maybe even yesterday.’

  It was a joke, but it wasn’t a joke.

  ‘When did you last have a proper meal?’ Liz demanded. ‘Or a decent night’s sleep?’

  He gave her a weary smile. ‘Sleep? What’s that? I don’t think I’m familiar with the concept.’

  Her expression was a mixture of concern and rebuke.

  ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to snatch a couple of hours this afternoon instead of going to the pictures?’

  ‘Nope.’ He shook his head as though to clear it and headed for the door. ‘You might have to elbow me in the ribs if I start snoring, though.’

  ‘Meet you at one o’clock, then?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Oh, and Liz,’ he added, already halfway out of the door. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Tea and sympathy,’ he said. For the briefest of moments, a smile lit up his face. ‘Well, sympathy anyway.’ With a wave of his hand, he plunged back into the fray.

  ‘And to think,’ Liz said softly to herself and a sparrow which was sitting on the outside windowsill, ‘that I once dismissed Adam Buchanan as one of the Idle Rich. I’ve never seen anyone work so hard.’

  He was more relaxed by the time they came out of the cinema that afternoon, laughing about the film they’d seen.

  ‘Didn’t you love the way the German spies were so stupid, and the British were so clever? And they were all so terribly stiff-upper-lip— Uh-oh!’ The air-raid siren had started up.

  ‘Probably a false alarm,’ he said, but there was a question in his voice.

  ‘Maybe we’d better be safe than sorry,’ said Liz.

  ‘You’re right. There’s a shelter in the crypt of the church at the top of the road.’ He held out a hand to her and they ran.

  Glaswegians had at first been blasé when air-raid warnings had started to sound. There were a lot of false alarms, but the attacks which took place in the middle of September had quickly made most folk see sense. The German planes dropped a mixture of bombs and incendiaries, starting fires and causing a great deal of damage all over the city.

  One raider scored a direct hit on HMS Sussex, berthed at Yorkhill Quay, not far from the Western. Slicing through her, the bomb had exploded directly over her oil tanks, causing a fierce fire to take hold immediately. Sixteen sailors had died and twenty-nine had been injured. After that, people began to take the sirens more seriously.

  Sitting in the pitch black of the shelter, Liz was terrified. Her stomach was churning and her skin was clammy. This definitely wasn’t another false alarm. She could hear the German planes overhead.

  They sounded different
to the British ones. Distinguishing the various aeroplanes was a skill many people had picked up. Dominic Gallagher had become quite an expert. He could tell a Heinkel 111 from a Junker 88 and was quite happy to explain the differences to anyone who cared to listen. Usually at some length.

  It didn’t sound as though there were a lot of planes up there. Liz thought back to HMS Sussex. It only needed one. She felt warm male fingers wrap themselves around her own.

  ‘All right, MacMillan?’ murmured Adam.

  ‘Not really,’ she whispered back, her lips close to his ear so that the people around them wouldn’t hear. There were at least two children in here. She didn’t want to alarm them.

  That was a joke. The air-raid siren was bad enough in itself - that whooping, banshee wail. The noise and vibration of the first sticks of bombs dropping, uncomfortably close to where they sat, was - well, you could think of a lot of words. None of them came close to describing the mind-numbing terror Liz was currently experiencing.

  Adam gave her hand a squeeze. ‘Time to show an example, I think.’ He waited till there was a brief pause in the bombardment.

  ‘I think it’s so vulgar to make loud noises, don’t you?’ he asked the assembled company, his voice firm and carrying, but deliberately languid. ‘These Nazis are terribly uncouth.’

  Despite her fear, Liz felt a bubble of amusement surface. Vulgar. That was Adam Buchanan’s favourite criticism. He was such a snob. How had she, a true Red Clydesider, ever got mixed up with a man like this?

  ‘Let’s sing some rude songs,’ he suggested.

  ‘Oh, aye, mister,’ came an enthusiastic young voice.

  ‘Nothing too rude,’ came an anxious female one.

  ‘Of course not.’ That was Adam again. ‘One has one’s standards, after all. Even if there is a war on. Let’s see now. Here’s one.’ To the tune of My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, he began singing.