Dear Mrs. Bird: A Novel

by AJ Pearce

  ‘Ah. I’m glad I found you, Emmeline,’ he said as I apologised. ‘Ahem.’ He paused, stared at the wall and ran his hand through his hair, making it stick up. ‘So. Yes. This is highly unprofessional, not to mention hideously awkward, but there we are and all that. Charles would be furious if he knew. Hmm.’

  He stopped and looked sheepish.

  ‘Ahem,’ he said again. ‘So. Yes.’

  ‘What is it, Mr Collins?’ I asked as he trailed off again.

  Then I realised. ‘Oh. Gosh. Is it about Captain Mayhew?’ I said in a rush before being struck dumb by the social horror of it all.

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr Collins. ‘Ha. Yes.’

  We both looked at the floor in abject misery. Finally, Mr Collins did the gentlemanly thing and pulled himself together. He glanced behind him in case anyone was coming, which they weren’t.

  ‘So,’ he managed, with some effort. ‘Didn’t mention earlier. Rather realised I should. Just to say, Emmy, er Emmeline, or indeed, Miss Lake, that my young brother Charles was as happy as I have seen him for some time following your jaunt to the cinema.’ He cleared his throat. ‘And. So. Right then. I just wanted to say, that if, for any reason, you think that working for, that is, alongside I should say, in many ways, er, me, here . . .’

  He pursed his lips and looked me in the eye. Then he gave a big sigh and hurled himself in.

  ‘Emmeline, Charles very much enjoyed meeting you. I know he would be delighted if he were to do so again and I don’t want you to think you mustn’t, just because we work in the same office. I don’t think it is something people here need to know about, and I certainly won’t mention it again. So if you did want to . . .’ He paused. ‘Or perhaps not . . .’

  This was unbearable.

  ‘It’s all right, Mr Collins,’ I said. ‘I thought I might rather like to,’ I managed.

  Then I returned to looking mortified again. This was worse than when Father caught Bunty and me laughing at the drawings in one of his medical books when we were twelve.

  ‘Oh right. Good. Yes. Good oh,’ said Mr Collins, look- ing enormously relieved. ‘That’s sorted, then. I’m so sorry to put you through this. Dreadful. No idea how parents manage. Not really my thing. Hmm.’ But he smiled at me and looked proud. ‘He’s a good chap, young Charles,’ he said. ‘Good chap. Goes without saying, of course.’

  And then Mr Collins marched briskly down the stairs in exactly the same direction from which he had first appeared.

  *

  It was a relief to go back to my desk and begin typing up a new romance series. I’d just got to a part where a young Wren had been posted to a naval base and immediately fallen in love with two officers at the same time, when Clarence arrived, sporting a new hair-do which featured an enthusiastic amount of Brylcreem, and clearly electric with the hope that it might make an impression on Kathleen.

  ‘Good morning,’ he called, starting well in a gruff voice, before squeaking out ‘ladies’ in an unexpectedly high finale.

  ‘House copies,’ he added gravely. ‘And post.’

  I was up in a flash, pushing my chair back so that it scraped loudly across the wooden floor.

  ‘New issue. Thank you, Clarence,’ I bellowed, grabbing the bundle from him. ‘Post. Smashing.’

  This was the issue with Confused’s letter in it. So much for me blithely writing a reply for Fed Up and thinking it was easy to just keep sneaking things into ‘Henrietta Helps’. With proof of my insurgency now in print, I was jumpy as a frog.

  ‘Gosh, Emmy, you’re keen,’ said Kath. ‘Hello, Clarence, you look nice.’

  Clarence looked stricken to the core.

  ‘Thank you, Clarence,’ said Kath gently, feeling sorry for him. ‘Are you all right, Emmy?’

  ‘Fine, thanks,’ I said. ‘Loads to do.’

  I could feel perspiration on my back as I put the bundle of magazines on the floor by my desk and started to go through the post. What if Mrs Bird decided to read this week’s Woman’s Friend as a one-off? What if she actually always read the magazine, but left it very neatly on her desk so that it just looked as if she didn’t read it? I told myself to show some backbone. Everyone was convinced Mrs Bird didn’t look at finished copies. Confused’s letter would be fine and so would Fed Up’s.

  But my heart still raced and I reasoned that it might not be a bad idea to take a short breather from putting any other letters into the magazine. And perhaps even from writing to the readers as well. After all, I had been pushing my luck recently. The idea of lying low for a bit did rather appeal.

  I looked at the door nervously. Mrs Bird was in her office and might launch herself at us at any moment. It would be best to act as if everything was perfectly normal. I would open her post and then take Acceptable Letters and a copy of the new issue into her office.

  I told myself everything would be absolutely fine and opened the first letter.

  Dear Mrs. Bird

  I have just spent an endless ninety minutes holding a skein of wool as my wife untangled it. A thoroughly wretched business indeed. Why on earth is this not sold in balls?

  Yours,

  T. Leonard Esq.

  A wool enquiry was right up Mrs Bird’s street. I relaxed slightly and opened the next one.

  Dear Mrs. Bird

  I am in love with a young Polish airman who is stationed near by. We have been going together for nearly a year, and he has asked me to be his wife. My mother wants me to wait until after the war because she thinks we won’t last, but I love him and I know he loves me. He has a good education and is a gunner so has a serious job. The thing is, if he was English I don’t think Mother would mind in the least.

  Please tell me what I should do.

  In Love

  Poor In Love. It was desperately sad, not to mention unfair. It wasn’t the first letter I had seen on the subject either. I had read several like this – girls who had met and fallen in love with Allied soldiers from overseas. Mrs Bird ignored them all.

  Last week I had tried to get her to answer one, from a lovely girl very much in love with a man who had come from Czechoslovakia to fight. ‘He is one of the very best men you could ever meet,’ the girl had written.

  I’d chanced it with Mrs Bird, asking as a General Query if we took letters about Foreign Beaus.

  ‘I have no doubt he is a very brave young man indeed,’ she replied. ‘We are all most grateful to the Allied service-men.’ Then her tone changed. ‘But when the war is over, no one will want them here and almost certainly no one will want her over there either. Don’t pull a face, Miss Lake, it is how the world works. Such suggestions are best left alone.’

  There was no point showing her In Love’s letter, but I hated having to ignore another girl who had every right to be with whoever she chose. Especially now, when no one knew how long they might have, least of all the airmen. Why shouldn’t they be happy? It was hard enough holding on to love in the middle of war as it was, without people who didn’t understand making it even more difficult.

  I thought of Edmund. We’d known each other’s families for years and he’d ended up being absolutely rotten to me. Or Charles? I didn’t know anything about his background – other than being Mr Collins’ half-brother, and that didn’t shed very much light. But I was jolly well sure that if I might grow to like him, no one in my family would give a hoot where he was from, as long as he was a good man and decent to me. I was beginning to realise how lucky I was.

  A magnificent rustling noise from the corridor heralded the looming of Mrs Bird from her office.

  ‘Balaclavas for the troops,’ she announced, to no one and everyone at the same time. ‘I shall be an hour and a half.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Bird,’ called Kathleen, who was proofreading a recipe for a curried vegetable medley.

  ‘Miss Knighton, I do not like shouting,’ shouted Mrs Bird.

  ‘Sorry, Mrs Bird,’ said Kathleen.

  ‘What?’ shouted Mrs Bird, before giving up. ‘Young people.’
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  And with a loud Hmmph she was gone.

  As Kathleen shook her head and returned to the recipe, her face a picture of concentration, I looked down at the parcel of new magazines on the floor. Thinking of Edmund had made me remember my reply to Confused, whose fiancé had gone off the boil. The more I put off looking at it, the worse it felt. In my mind it now took up half of ‘Henrietta Helps’. A great big letter that Mrs Bird had not even seen, followed by advice she would never have given.

  With the same feeling of trepidation as waiting for exam results to be read out at school, I picked up the scissors from my desk, cut through the string, and unwrapped the package. There it was. The new issue of Woman’s Friend.

  I turned immediately to the second to last page, almost surprised when I had to look for Confused’s letter rather than seeing it leaping out of the page in letters at least ten inches high.

  I am very much in love with my fiancé, but he has suddenly become very cold . . . Should I marry him and hope that he comes round?

  It looked exactly like any other problem. A few lines long, with my answer neatly below.

  ‘What an unfortunate disappointment,’ I had written – briskly like Mrs Bird might.

  And a sadness all round. I suggest have a jolly good chat with your fiancé and if you aren’t convinced his heart is in it, then I am afraid it may be time to move on. It could feel quite rotten for a while, but I promise things will get better. Marriage is for a very long time and you deserve to be with someone who very much wants to be with you. I do hope your chap will step up, but if not, I am sure you will find the one that is really for you.

  So, there it was in print.

  It was the strangest feeling. Partly I felt like a fraud. After all, what did I know about marriage? But when I read it again, I could see that I had offered some hope. Confused could give her fiancé a chance, but if he didn’t make more effort, she wouldn’t have to get stuck. All in all, I thought it wasn’t too bad a reply. I hoped Confused would agree and either sort him out or push on and one day find her true love.

  I had to stifle a smile in case Kathleen saw. It felt good to have done something. I couldn’t fix it for Confused, but I’d tried to be something of a friend. And other readers might take comfort from it as well.

  Galvanised, I thought of In Love again. She deserved to be happy. She deserved to be allowed to make up her own mind.

  My plan to lie low had lasted less than three minutes. I had become too involved in the readers’ lives to just throw In Love’s letter away – or any of the others I might help for that matter. Putting their letters into the magazine was horribly risky, but I had been writing back to them for over a month and no one had suspected a thing. That part of things was watertight, I was absolutely convinced.

  I wasn’t working at the fire station tonight and I knew Bunty was going to the cinema with William so I would be alone in the flat. I hid In Love’s letter under some papers until Kathleen went out and I could slip it into my bag. Then I quietly got on with my day.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  To Us, Emmy Lake

  On Monday afternoon, when I had returned home from work, Captain Mayhew, or rather, Charles called me. He had a lovely telephone voice and it all went very well. Charles said how pleased he was that I had been all right during the last night’s raid and I said it wasn’t that bad really and didn’t mention seeing two children and a Fire Brigade nearly get squashed to death in the street.

  There was a bit of difficulty getting to the issue of seeing each other again, but after a tricky period where we both said different things over each other at the same time, and then a looming threat of neither of us saying anything at all, Charles took the bull by the horns.

  ‘I say, Emmy, do you enjoy dancing?’

  ‘Oh yes. Enormously,’ I said. ‘As a matter of fact Bunty and Bill are planning to go out the night after next.’ I stopped and cringed. It sounded as if I was fishing for an invitation to go along too.

  ‘Not that I’m fishing for an invitation to go along too,’ I said.

  Charles laughed. ‘I wouldn’t mind if you were. In fact, do you think you would mind if I asked you to go with me, just to be clear?’

  I laughed as well. ‘I would love to,’ I said.

  ‘If Bunty and her chap won’t mind?’

  ‘Bunty will be thrilled,’ I said, absolutely sure. ‘They both will.’

  Then we sorted out what time Charles should come over to the house and chatted a bit more before saying goodbye. After I put the phone down, I stood in the hall grinning like a loon. I had to admit it, Charles Mayhew certainly had a way of perking me up.

  I was right about Bunty too. When I told her about the dance, she thought it quite the best idea in the world, even if adding, ‘And I bet he won’t go off at the drop of a hat with some nurse or another like That Edmund,’ wasn’t entirely in the spirit of Forgive and Forget. I wasn’t sure I would be able to forgive Edmund, but I was doing my very best to forget.

  Still, if it helped Bunty move on from being in a fury with That Edmund (as she now always referred to him) then it was all the better. I didn’t say anything but I thought it would be a good opportunity to make it up with Bill too. The more I thought about it, the worse I felt about giving him such a telling off when actually he had been incredibly brave.

  On Wednesday evening Bunty and I were ready early. She had put on a pale green day dress she’d worn for her twenty-first birthday and updated with a layer of chiffon that looked awfully nice and floated about when she danced. I had decided on a midnight-blue silk frock which, though several years old, was my most favourite article in my wardrobe and when Bunts and I had a quick waltz around the flat as a practice, I was hopeful that I would pass muster.

  With time on our hands, the two of us did have a rather wet outbreak of worry over where we should greet Charles and William, as dragging them all the way upstairs to the flat when we were about to go straight out again seemed daft. We thought about using one of the reception rooms downstairs, but they had been covered with dust sheets since Bunty’s granny left last year. The windows were all taped up and the blackout curtains permanently drawn. The rooms were fusty too and more than that, seemed grand and showy compared to our flat upstairs.

  We decided we would invite the boys up as after all that was where we lived and as William was in and out of the house all the time seeing Bunty, he would think we had gone mad to do anything else. Bunty suggested we offer sherry as a reward and I suggested we have one ourselves to get into the swing of things. Bunty put on a Joe Loss record and turned the volume up while I bolted my sherry and unnecessarily rearranged a china duck on the mantel-piece.

  ‘Don’t be nervous,’ Bunty said kindly, as the bell rang and I nearly dropped the duck. ‘We’re all going to have the loveliest time. Now go and answer the door.’

  It was twenty-nine minutes past seven and having flown down the three flights of stairs to the door, I paused for a second to pull myself together and arrange my face into a welcoming smile.

  ‘Oof,’ I said out loud in the large and freezing cold hall. My mouth was dry and my lips had stuck themselves to my gums. ‘Good evening,’ I whispered to myself just as I had rehearsed. ‘Good evening, Charles,’ I added more flamboyantly to a large Chinese urn.

  It was a simple enough greeting. I switched the hall light off so I wouldn’t get shouted at by a passing ARP warden, pulled back the heavy curtains, and opened the front door.

  Charles was standing on the doorstep in the dark, smiling a little shyly from under his army cap.

  ‘Hello, Emmy,’ he said. ‘You look lovely.’

  It was ever so kind as he couldn’t really see me with the light off.

  ‘Good evening, Charles,’ I managed, which came out very formally and rather as if I was about to start broadcasting the news. I wondered whether to say he looked lovely as well, but wasn’t sure it was the Done Thing so I clung on to the curtains until I was struck with inspiration
and asked him if he should like to come in. With the door safely closed, I switched on the light and led him up to the flat.

  Bunty, who I knew had been practising looking casual, was in the living room, standing with one hand on the mantelpiece while staring into mid-distance. She looked as if she was modelling a pattern for Vogue.

  Before I could announce him, Bunty burst into action and exclaimed, ‘Charles!’ and Charles exclaimed, ‘Bunty!’ rather as if they had discovered gold, and then they shook hands in relief that they had established first-name terms again and avoided the difficult You Must Call Me Charles, Do Call Me Bunty business. Then the doorbell rang again.

  ‘Are you well?’ said Charles as Bunty ran off downstairs.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said, without thinking. ‘I was going to say that. What an idiot. Me. Not you, of course.’ I grimaced. ‘It is nice to see you,’ I said in the end, because really, it was.

  Charles laughed. ‘It’s nice to see you too,’ he said. And then he took hold of my hands which was tons better than the handshake he and Bunty had done, but meant that then we were standing in the living room holding hands when Bunty and William came in.

  ‘Well now,’ said Bunty, which was unhelpful.

  I snatched my hands away from Charles and immediately wished that I hadn’t. I couldn’t see how I might shove them back at him though so I said hello to William instead. It was the first time I had seen him since the row, so I was self-conscious and wondered if he felt the same. It may have been my imagination but he did seem a little uptight.

  Remembering my manners just in time, I introduced the two men, somehow managing to do it without appearing an absolute nitwit.

  Charles and William both looked splendid in their uniforms and immediately expressed admiration for the other’s work in The Current Situation.

  ‘I don’t know how you chaps do it,’ said Charles seriously as they shook hands. ‘Fire terrifies me. I very much admire you.’