After the War is Over

by Maureen Lee

  Half an hour later she was in her parents’ house, being interrogated by her mother. Hadn’t it entered her head to comb her hair before coming out? Why was she without coat or cardigan when, although it might well be April, today was extremely chilly?

  ‘Dad,’ Grace said desperately, ‘will you please tell Mum to shut up.’

  ‘Shush, darling,’ her father said mildly, ‘and leave our daughter alone.’

  Maggie muttered something about Holly having a new boyfriend coming to tea and what on earth would he think of her sister, after which she obediently shut up.

  It wasn’t until late that night that Grace returned to the flat. She would have waited and gone back in the morning, but it would have meant a relentless third degree from her mother once her father had gone to work.

  She found Louise sitting fully dressed on the bed. ‘You weren’t raped, were you?’ Grace said angrily. ‘Why couldn’t you have told the truth? Why on earth claim to be raped when you weren’t?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Louise said dreamily, a sickly expression on her face. ‘When it was over, I felt terrible about the whole thing, cheap and nasty. I was a virgin and I’d just lost my virginity to a stranger who I’d fallen in love with at first sight. The thing is, though, it was absolutely wonderful, gentle and romantic and passionate, truly lovely, but I imagined him thinking I was “easy virtue”, as they say. When it was over, I just panicked and insisted on leaving.’

  ‘I see,’ Grace said, though she didn’t. ‘Where’s he been all this time? And what’s happening now?’

  ‘He was on his way home to the States after doing some business in London for his father, but was held up getting a signature on a contract when he found the person had gone away for Christmas. On Boxing Day, he tracked him down, then flew home.’

  ‘And didn’t give you a second thought.’ Grace threw herself on to the bed, leant against the headboard, and sternly folded her arms.

  ‘He did, actually, lots of second thoughts. But I’d behaved like a lunatic, hadn’t I? I mean, when we went into his bedroom, I’d wanted him to make love to me, really wanted him to. I’m not sure, I was sozzled at the time, but I might even have initiated it. Then when it was over I had hysterics.’

  ‘So why did he come back?’

  Louise sighed, one of those lovely, long, pleasurable sighs that so far Grace had only made when she bit into a particularly scrumptious chocolate. ‘Because he couldn’t forget me. He could tell it was my first time and understood why I panicked. His name’s Gary Dixon, by the way.’

  ‘So what’s happening now?’

  ‘We’re getting married.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘On Saturday. Gary’s getting an emergency licence or something.’ Another long, ecstatic sigh. ‘Will you be my bridesmaid, Grace?’

  It wasn’t the path that Grace had imagined their lives would take. She had assumed the two of them would continue to have a good time for the next two or three years without any intention of getting married. The arrival of a baby on the scene had already put a spoke in this vision of a future, but they could have worked alternate shifts and taken turns looking after the baby. Or her mother might have been willing to look after it from time to time; after all, she was on the lookout for a worthwhile job, and it would almost be like working for a charity.

  But now, not only was Louise getting married, but she was going to live in America; in Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Iris, was telephoning Grace’s mother several times a day wanting to know what Gary was like. Where did Louise meet him? How long had they known each other? Did he come from a good family?

  ‘Well I don’t know, do I?’ Maggie said reasonably to Grace. ‘I mean, I haven’t set eyes on him, and you hardly know a thing about him, so I’m not likely to know anything, am I? I must say, it is rather sudden and I feel sorry for Iris, I really do. I hope you don’t go off and do something like this.’ She paused for breath. ‘Thank goodness Holly is getting engaged at Easter and by this time next year she’ll be off me and your dad’s hands and someone else’s responsibility.’

  ‘Am I a responsibility too?’ Grace asked, hurt.

  ‘No, of course you’re not, luv,’ her mother gushed. ‘And Holly isn’t either. Don’t take any notice of me. Most of the time I haven’t a clue what I’m saying.’

  Gary’s parents – or ‘folks’, as he called them – were unable to travel from Boston for the wedding, and another ceremony would take place there the following week.

  Iris and Tom Grant and their two other daughters, Dorothy and Clare, were staying at a hotel in Islington for a few days. They didn’t meet their prospective son-in-law and his best man, an old friend from college who lived in London, until the day before the wedding. They all sat through a stiff, uncomfortable meal during which Iris kept trying to start a conversation but no one helped continue it.

  Grace didn’t go to the meal. She was fed up with the entire situation and couldn’t wait for everything to be over. Next day, her mother, unaware that she herself hadn’t been invited to the wedding, assumed that she had and managed to stop things falling apart by making a huge amount of noise that covered up the awful silences and other embarrassments.

  In the middle of it all, Iris, exhausted from the strain, burst into tears. ‘Oh, I can’t stand it,’ she wailed.

  ‘It’ll be all right, old girl,’ Tom said, as if he was comforting a dog.

  Gary, who was as handsome as that new film star, Robert Redford, looked extremely uncomfortable throughout the brief ceremony.

  The atmosphere improved slightly after the wedding, when they went to a restaurant for a meal. It was an expensive place, Gary was paying, and the wine flowed liberally. His father, Gary explained, owned a bank. It had been started by his great-grandfather at the end of the last century and, unlike so many banks, had managed to survive the depression.

  At five o’clock Grace decided it was time to go and leave Gary and the Grants to get to know each other. Her mother left with her.

  ‘Me and your dad are going out to dinner tonight – why don’t you come with us, love?’

  Grace went because she didn’t like the idea of being alone. She didn’t fancy living in the room in Islington on her own, but she fancied even less finding someone else to share it with.

  The following Monday, she acquired a passport application form, completed it, and took it to the office in Victoria where passports could be obtained over the counter rather than waiting weeks for them to come by post. She joined the Youth Hostel Association and studied maps, deciding where to go.

  Louise and Gary left for America, to live in his parents’ big house in the West End area, the best and richest part of Boston.

  ‘I’ll come and visit you when the baby is born,’ Grace promised.

  ‘Oh will you? I know I love Gary, but I wish we could have lived in London.’ Louise clung tearfully to her friend. ‘I feel awful leaving Mum and Dad, my sisters and William. I wonder why he didn’t come to the wedding.’

  ‘It was very short notice. Perhaps he had something important to do.’ Grace looked tearfully at her friend. ‘Goodbye, Lou.’

  ‘Ta-ra, Grace.’ The girls embraced and swore it wouldn’t be for the last time.

  Maggie screamed when Grace announced her plan to hitchhike as far as France and from there to wherever her spirit might take her.

  ‘Kids! They break your heart,’ she wept into Jack’s shoulder when her daughter was leaving.

  Grace just thought it typical of her mother to behave in such an exaggerated way, but after she’d gone, Maggie cried herself to sleep for weeks, while up in Liverpool Louise’s mother was doing the same thing. Fathers might be sad when their children leave, Maggie thought, but mothers feel as if they are losing part of themselves, creating a wound that will never heal.

  Chapter 17

  The telephone rang at three minutes after eight. Jack, who was about to leave for work, picked up the receiver and reeled off the Kaminskis’ nu
mber.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ he said warmly after a pause. ‘And what can I do for you?’

  He listened, nodding from time to time, frowning slightly, before telling the caller that he’d look into it that very day and ring back when he came home from work. ‘Bye, Nell,’ he said, before replacing the receiver.

  ‘Why on earth is Nell calling you?’ Maggie said, aware that she sounded unreasonably bad-tempered.

  Jack opened the front door. ‘Because she wanted to speak to me,’ he said. ‘Farewell, my darling.’ He stepped outside, grinning, and closed the door.

  ‘Huh!’ Maggie snorted. She thought about ringing Nell, but it didn’t seem right somehow. If her friend had wanted to speak to her, she’d only had to ask.

  She went into the kitchen. It was Monday. Mam had always done the washing on Mondays, and Maggie still did, even if it only meant throwing the dirty clothes into the automatic washing machine and switching it on. No more dolly tubs, mangles and having things soaking in bowls for days to get the stains out. If it was raining, the contents were merely transferred to the tumble dryer, a piece of equipment that she used rather more often than she should, including on lovely sunny days when there wasn’t a cloud in sight – she loathed hanging washing on the line. The role of women was gradually being sidelined, she thought darkly, though she wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  In an office in St John’s Street, in the centre of Liverpool, Nell Finnegan was peeling onions, a metal spoon clamped between her teeth. It was probably an old wives’ tale, but some women swore their eyes didn’t water if they held something metal in their mouth while handling onions. Nell had been doing it for years, but still couldn’t be sure if it helped.

  She spread the chopped onions over the pieces of sirloin steak at the bottom of the large metal casserole dish, added the carrots and a final layer of thick sliced potatoes. She made a gravy of Bisto and various spices, poured it over, put the lid on, and moved the dish out of the way for now. At eleven o’clock, it would go in the oven.

  It was nearly ten and time to make a morning drink for the staff of Gregory, Forrester and Turnbull, a firm of solicitors that had practised in Liverpool for almost fifty years. The first Mr Gregory had died before the war and his place had been taken by his son, young Mr Gregory, who was nearly seventy. Mr Forrester only came in on Mondays and Fridays, and Mr Turnbull was in a home for the elderly in Birkdale and not expected to last much longer.

  There were other solicitors in the firm who would no doubt appear on the headed notepaper at some time in the future, five altogether, and it was for these gentlemen, plus Mr Gregory and, twice a week, Mr Forrester, that Nell cooked lunch, which they ate in the conference room off a massive oval oak table with claw legs.

  It wasn’t exactly a taxing job. The hours were nine thirty to four, and all Nell was required to do was make a different type of casserole for each day of the week, followed by a simple pudding of something like stewed apple or pears or fresh fruit trifle.

  The second, slightly less important part of her job was to make morning and afternoon drinks for the other staff, twenty-two altogether – secretaries, typists, clerks, and an office boy – and take them round on a tray.

  Everyone was terribly grateful and painfully polite. Nell bearing trays of tea and coffee was a welcome sight in their otherwise terribly dull and boring lives. Fridays, she was often presented with flowers and chocolates. Miss Stokes, Mr Gregory’s secretary, was knitting her a stole.

  Her lads came into the office from time to time to make sure she wasn’t being exploited or overworked. It was June, and Kev had already taken his A levels and would leave school soon. Quinn had acquired a part-time job in a supermarket. What with occasional royalties from Red’s records and Nell and Quinn’s wages, the Finnegans weren’t doing at all badly financially.

  Once the Finnegan Brothers, as they had decided to call themselves, had launched themselves professionally on to the world, they expected to make their fortune and their ma would never have to work again.

  The drinks seen to, the casserole in the oven, Nell made herself a cup of tea, sat on the hard chair in the small, basic kitchen and took out of her apron pocket the letter that had arrived that morning from a film company she’d never heard of in Los Angeles. Cerulean Productions intended making a movie in the near future called Lost in Paradise and wished to use the song ‘Ode to Nell’. They understood that the composer, Red Finnegan, had died the previous year, and as his next of kin, would she agree to the use of the song. They offered a five-thousand-dollar fee for the privilege and hoped to hear soon that she approved.

  If Red were alive he would be so thrilled; over the moon, in fact. She smiled at the thought and remembered the first time he’d sung ‘Ode to Nell’ to her, in the living room, making the words up as he went along. She closed her eyes, visualising the scene. It would be so easy to cry and get furiously angry at the way he had been taken away from her and his lads, killed by a drunken driver.

  The song hadn’t done particularly well. She felt a sudden urge to keep it to herself, her and Red’s song, but he hadn’t written it just for her, but for the world, for everyone who wanted to listen to it.

  And the money would come in useful. Five thousand dollars was the equivalent of two thousand five hundred pounds. She could pay off the mortgage so there wouldn’t be any more monthly instalments to find.

  She wasn’t sure why she’d telephoned Jack Kaminski. She assumed that working in a bank he knew all about money. Saying yes to the letter seemed the obvious decision to make, but was it the right one? She fancied some advice first.

  Jack telephoned that night, and was of the opinion that saying yes might be a mistake.

  ‘Why?’ Nell asked.

  ‘Well, first of all, Nell,’ Jack said in his lovely warm voice with only the faintest hint of a foreign accent, ‘the bank has a branch in Los Angeles. I phoned an acquaintance there and he advised me that Cerulean Productions are a very prestigious company. They rarely produce more than one picture a year and always get excellent reviews.’

  He listed three pictures, but Nell had to admit she hadn’t seen any of them. ‘Red and I never seemed to have time for the cinema, though I used to love going with Maggie.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Jack went on, ‘I then talked to someone else here and they said you might be better asking for a share of the profits. If the picture does well, you’d earn massively more than five thousand dollars, though you’d have to wait a while before you got it.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t do well?’

  ‘You’ll get hardly anything!’ It was like a bet, he told her. And it all depended on how much she needed the money. If she was hard up, then accept it, but if she was willing to take the risk . . . ‘Think about it, Nell,’ he advised. If she took the second option, she would need to get further advice from an accountant who was familiar with the ins and outs of show business. ‘I will find the right person for you,’ he promised.

  ‘I’ll talk to the lads about it,’ Nell said. She’d do it straight away.

  ‘Take the chance, Ma,’ Quinn said firmly. ‘Take the chance, not the money. It’s what me da would’ve done.’

  Kev agreed. ‘I think so too, Ma. Our da always loved a bet.’

  There seemed no more need for discussion. Nell telephoned Jack there and then and told him what they had decided, and he said he would set the ball rolling in the morning.

  Half an hour later, Maggie rang. ‘Nell, you are not under any circumstances to turn down that money,’ she said in a bullying tone. ‘I mean, five thousand dollars is a small fortune. Jack doesn’t realise just how hard up you are. The advice he gave you was very irresponsible. Don’t take any notice of him.’

  Nell wasn’t prepared for an argument. She informed her friend that she wasn’t hard up, that she liked the idea of getting a share of the film’s profit, even if turned out to be only a very small one, and she was grateful to Jack for adding a touch of spice and excitement to he
r rather dull life. ‘Ta-ra, Maggie.’

  She rang off with a flourish and grinned at her lads. She would probably have to sign one or two things in the future, but they decided not to talk about the matter, not even in passing, until after the film was made.

  ‘How’s your son getting on in London, Iris?’ Blanche Woods enquired. ‘Is he still working for that woman MP?’

  ‘Kathleen Curran. Oh yes,’ Iris confirmed. ‘We had a letter from him only the other day.’ It had been a postcard of the Houses of Parliament, actually, and Iris knew why William had sent it. It meant he didn’t have to write ‘Dear Mum and Dad’ as he would on a letter. He clearly found it uncomfortable associating with the couple who had raised him since he was a few hours old. She smiled and sighed at the same time. Nowadays, she was able to accept the way things had gone with William and her daughter, Louise, without wanting to scream and burst into tears. When Louise’s baby was born in September, she and Tom were going to Boston to see their first grandchild.

  ‘Would you like to deal with this customer, or shall I?’ she said to Blanche. It was Saturday afternoon and they were in Owen Owen’s ladies’ coat department, where Iris had worked two days a week, Fridays and Saturdays, for almost a year. It had seemed only fair that she earn some money once the children had grown and she had time to spare, rather than depend for everything on Tom.

  ‘I’ll see to her,’ Blanche said. ‘I like the look of the chap she’s with, don’t you? He’s dead handsome, and I reckon he’s much younger than she is.’

  Iris glanced briefly at the tall, dark-haired man, elegantly dressed, accompanying the rather dowdy little woman wishing to buy a coat. ‘He’s not bad,’ she muttered. She hadn’t been interested in men for a long time.

  She wandered away, pretending to tidy a row of jackets, taking the hangers off the rail and shaking the garments, rather than stand looking as if she had nothing to do. She finished the row and caught sight of herself in a mirror. When she’d started looking for work, she’d had her greying hair dyed to its original blonde, lost weight, and bought smarter clothes – including two pairs of high-heeled shoes. She’d actually forgotten how flattering high heels were, and the lovely feeling she got from wearing them with gleaming silk stockings. She smoothed the black material of her skirt over her hips and adjusted the collar of her white silk blouse, pleased with her reflection.