Across the Mersey

by Annie Groves

  Now bathed and fed and wrapped in a towel – she couldn’t let him put his own filthy and shabby clothes back on again – and his story told, he was leaning against her so exhausted that he was falling asleep.

  Very carefully Francine lifted her arm and put it round him, pulling him close to her. It seemed like a small but very special miracle that he was here, this thin ungainly boy who was all arms and legs but whose body curved as sweetly and rightly into her hold as he had done the day he had been born. Her arms tightened around him.

  She was still holding him half an hour later when Jean and Sam came home.

  Jean’s face lost its colour when she saw him.

  ‘Oh, Francine, what have you done?’

  Francine shook her head and said quietly, ‘It isn’t what you think,’ as Jack woke up and looked uncertainly at Jean.

  ‘Well, Vi will have to be told.’

  ‘But not yet, Jean,’ Francine pleaded. ‘At least let him have a decent night’s sleep.’

  Sam had carried Jack upstairs and laid him on Francine’s bed when he had fallen asleep again halfway through retelling his story to Jean.

  ‘Fran’s right, love,’ he said. ‘Let the poor lad at least have his sleep.’

  ‘But Vi will be so worried.’

  ‘Mebbe, if she knows what’s happened, but my guess is that this couple that had the lad and were supposed to be looking after him won’t be in any rush to report him missing. Not after the way they’ve been treating him. They probably think he’s around somewhere and that he’ll have to come back to them. It will probably be the morning before they let anyone in authority know that he’s gone, and even then I doubt anyone will be in a rush to let your Vi know. It was a real bit of luck for the lad, him getting on a train for Liverpool. He could have ended up anywhere.’

  ‘He was so desperate to get away from those dreadful people that he probably would have risked doing that,’ said Francine.

  ‘Well, I suppose you’re right, Sam, but if I were our Vi and it was my son—’

  ‘But that’s the whole point, isn’t it, Jean?’ Francine pointed out emotionally. ‘If he had been your son, this wouldn’t have happened.’ Francine’s voice broke. She got up and ran into the hall and up the stairs.

  ‘Oh, Sam, I feel so awful. Fran’s right. If we’d had him—’

  ‘I’m not having you blaming yourself for any of this, Jean. Like I’ve said before, you were in no fit state to do anything for anyone when Jack was born. If anyone’s to blame then it’s the so-and-so who went and got your Fran into the trouble in the first place, and then your Vi for not doing right by Jack when she and Edwin took him on. I’m not saying that I don’t feel it’s a damn shame that the poor little tyke’s bin treated the way he was, and I’m not saying neither that I don’t feel like going and finding the chap who’s bin treating him so badly and letting him know what I think of men like him, because I do. But we both know that it’s ruddy Edwin who should be doing that. Not that he will. Let Francine have her bit of time with Jack, love. It’s little enough, and even if your Vi does know that Jack’s gone missing, which I doubt, it won’t do her any harm to worry about him for once.’

  Jean looked at her husband. ‘Well, if that’s what you think, Sam …’

  ‘It is,’ he told her firmly.

  ‘Hello, there.’

  Seb’s voice might sound weak but there was no mistaking the fact that he was a lot better than he had been twenty-four hours ago, Grace acknowledged, hoping that her smile wasn’t quite as wobbly as it felt and that it looked properly professional.

  ‘Nurse Reid told me that it is thanks to your kaolin poulticing that I’m not going to lose my arm.’

  Grace knew that she was blushing now.

  ‘It’s Staff Nurse Reid,’ Grace reproved him firmly, ‘and I dare say she said no such thing.’

  She was doing a locker round and Sister encouraged her nurses to chat to the patients whilst doing this chore because she believed that giving the men a chance to talk about themselves could sometimes highlight problems they weren’t willing to mention during a formal consultant’s round.

  ‘I admit I never really thought I’d be here and that you’d be nursing me when I made you promise to do your training.’

  ‘I owe you such a lot over what you did for me,’ said Grace.

  ‘It all seems such a long time ago now, and in another life.’

  ‘Yes,’ Grace agreed. For no reason at all she was remembering how she had felt when he had kissed her and she suppressed another blush.

  ‘Sister said I was rambling away in French. I just hope I didn’t say anything too ripe that I shouldn’t have said in a woman’s presence.’

  Grace shook her head. ‘The only word I could make out properly was “Marie”. You kept saying it over and over again, and I thought that maybe she was a girl you’d fallen in love with.’ She had said far too much but it was too late now to wish that she hadn’t.

  ‘She’s a French girl. We were billeted in the village where she lived, and … and working together. I wasn’t in love with her, but I felt guilty about leaving her behind, knowing what she and her family were likely to be facing, but she wouldn’t have had it any other way. She’s a patriot, you see, and France means everything to her.’

  It surprised Sebastion to discover how easy it was to talk openly and honestly to Grace about Marie and his feelings.

  ‘I think I can understand that. I know I’d hate to think of this country having to surrender to Hitler.’

  ‘We’ve got to win this war otherwise there is no hope for any of us,’ said Sebastion.

  ‘Everyone’s afraid that Hitler will invade us like he has done those other countries.’

  ‘Everyone? Does that include you, Grace?’ Sebastion asked her.

  ‘Yes,’ she told him honestly, ‘but I try not to think about it and to get on with my work. My family have been so lucky. My brother, Luke, came back from Dunkirk uninjured, and so apparently did Charlie. Luke’s been posted to Home Duties now at Seacombe barracks.’

  ‘Churchill will want to concentrate all his manpower at home to defend the country if Hitler does invade,’ said Seb, thinking privately about the role he would be playing in that defence as soon as he was fit enough to leave hospital. His gift for languages made him an important part of the team being assembled at Derby House, the Headquarters for Joint Strategic Planning, involving both the navy and the RAF coast defence units, as well liaising with Fighter Command Group 12. His job as a special operator and a member of the ‘Y’ Section would be to spend his days incarcerated in a silent set room, listening for designated enemy coded messages, mainly in German.

  It would be someone else, sitting in a similar room in a different part of the country, who would listen in for Marie’s coded messages. Perhaps it was just as well that it would not be him, Seb admitted, but he knew too that she had made a lasting impression on him and that he could never forget her even if, as he had truthfully told Grace, he was not in love with her.

  Being at war acted like a pressure cooker on the emotions when people worked closely together, forcing them into something they might otherwise not have been.

  There had been nights when his own desire to give in to temptation and take the physical pleasure Marie had suggested they should share had come perilously close to overwhelming him. The only thing that had stopped him had been knowing that if he did he would have been breaking the rules he had been warned explicitly against breaking. A soldier away from home might with moral impunity visit a brothel, but he should not and must not become sexually involved with another member of a close-knit team. Marie’s attitude towards sex had been very different from his own, and he suspected that he would not have been her first lover, and certainly not her last. It was, though, France that held her heart, no matter what she chose to do with her body. Grace was very different, softer and warmer, a gentler, sweeter-natured girl, and far more dangerously easy to fall in love with.


  Jean couldn’t believe it. She had only left the house half an hour ago, and only to go up to the shop and use the telephone to alert Vi to what had happened. That alone hadn’t been very pleasant, what with Vi getting so cross and refusing to believe at first that Jack had been as badly treated as he had said, and even threatening to send him straight back again. But now to come back home and find out that Francine and Jack had disappeared and that Francine hadn’t left so much as a note behind saying where they had gone had been enough to have Jean sitting down at her kitchen table with her hand pressed against her heart in an attempt to still its anxious racing beat.

  Now what was she going to say to Vi when she arrived to collect Jack? She had known the moment she had seen the way Francine had been holding Jack so tightly and so possessively last night that there was going to be trouble. Jean felt desperately sorry for her nephew and for Fran herself, but she was still shocked that Fran could do something so thoughtless and silly.

  Francine watched with a hungry loving maternal gaze as Jack tucked into the fish paste sandwiches she had ordered for him. They were in Joe Lyons, and Jack’s eyes were constantly rounding with curiosity and excitement as he stared about and took everything in.

  All she could manage herself was a cup of tea, she was that strung up inside. More than one of Joe Lyons’ famous nippy waitresses had paused long enough to give Jack a brief smile as she had hurried past, causing Francine’s heart to swell with motherly pride. Vi had taught him nice manners, she had to say that for her, even if Francine suspected they had been taught through fear rather than kindness. He spoke well too, not posh, but well, and she thought she could detect a hint of the rhythm of her own voice in his.

  She hadn’t had any plans in mind when she had given into the impulse that had brought them here. All she had known was that she was desperate to have him to herself for a while, to pretend that they were what they could have been and should have been if only things had been different.

  She had taken him to Lewis’s first to buy him some new clothes, not that there had been much choice, thanks to the war, but at least now he was wearing clothes that fitted him and were new. She had felt so proud and at the same time so humbled when he put his hand in hers of his own accord and before she had reached to take it.

  He had lost that reserve and hesitation with her now that he had had at first, and she had felt a dangerous thrill of delight this morning over breakfast when it had been her he had turned to to speak to first and not Jean.

  When he wasn’t afraid or intimidated, his smile was mischievous and his eyes so clear of any guile and so lovingly innocent that she felt as though she could eat him up. All she wanted to do was to sweep him up into her arms and keep him safe there for ever. She couldn’t bear to think about what he had been through and she couldn’t bear to think either that he would have to be handed back to Vi.

  He was quick and bright, and interested in everything: one minute a little boy, the next a heart-breakingly protective man-child, who obviously saw it as his duty to watch out for her.

  Francine had soon learned that Sam and Luke were his idols and that he adored them. Edwin and Charlie he seldom mentioned, and it seemed to Francine that it was fear, not love, that filled him whenever Vi was mentioned.

  They had walked from Lewis’s to the church where her mother was buried and Francine had shown him her stone.

  ‘She was my grandma, wasn’t she?’ he had asked knowledgeably.

  ‘Yes,’ Francine had agreed with a small choke in her voice. After all, it was true.

  There had been one shocking moment when they had walked past the theatre just as Con was coming out with his girl. Francine’s first instinct had been to hide Jack from him, as though there was a risk of Con recognising him and immediately demanding that she hand his son over to him. Which, of course, was ridiculous. The last thing Con would be likely to do was to acknowledge an illegitimate son. He and his wife did not have any children and the rumour had always been that she was unable to have any.

  As bad as that was, it surely couldn’t get any more painful than having the child you had had wrenched from your arms and given to someone else.

  Jack’s touch on her arm brought a lump to Francine’s throat.

  ‘What’s going to happen to me?’ he asked her, his appetite for his sandwiches suddenly vanishing. ‘I don’t want to go back to Mr and Mrs Davies. Will Mum make me, do you think?’

  Hearing that word ‘Mum’ and knowing it did not refer to her hurt so very much. And Vi wasn’t his mum at all, not really. What if she didn’t take him back to Jean’s? He was her child, after all. She could go back to America and take him with her. Her heart had started to thump far too heavily. She knew that what she was thinking was impossible. Legally, she was not his mother, and apart from anything else what would she tell Jack himself: ‘I’m really your mother but I gave you away’?

  The bond she was building with him was too new and too fragile for that. Reluctantly she let the impulse pass and concentrated instead on being practical.

  ‘Me and your auntie Jean are going to talk to … to Vi and explain to her what happened.’

  ‘But what if she still wants me to go back?’

  This was so heartbreaking.

  ‘We won’t let her,’ she told him firmly.

  ‘Promise?’

  Francine thought of the way that Vi had so stubbornly refused to tell them where he was and how she had been so determined that she did not see him, and her heart quailed at the thought of giving him a promise she knew that Vi would do her utmost to make sure she could not keep. But he was only a little boy and she could not explain any of the complex adult emotions that underlay Vi’s actions, and so instead she had to say and pray she could mean it, ‘Promise.’

  She saw the Wolseley car parked outside Jean and Sam’s as soon as they got off the bus. Immediately Jack tensed and pulled back.

  ‘That’s Dad’s car.’

  Francine had guessed that it must belong to Edwin and her own heart had sunk but she forced herself to sound cheerful and unconcerned.

  ‘Is it? I expect they’ve come to take you home.’

  Home! His home should be with her; she was his home.

  Jean let them in, her face set and anxious as she guided Jack into the front room. As soon as he saw his parents he cowered back against Jean, causing her heart to ache with sadness for him and anger against her twin. It wasn’t his fault that he had been born the way he had, and Vi had been the one to say she wanted him. He hadn’t been forced on her although to have heard what she had been saying whilst they waited for Francine to bring him back you’d have thought that she’d had no say in the matter whatsoever, and that Francine had simply left her baby with Vi and Edwin and taken off.

  ‘At last,’ Vi greeted Francine, giving her an acid look before turning to Jack and saying sharply, ‘Well, I hope you’re pleased with yourself, Jack, causing me and your dad all this worry and upset.’

  ‘Give over, Vi.’ That was Sam, who had slipped home to support Jean, knowing that Vi would try to bully her. ‘The poor kid’s had a pretty rotten time of it, by all accounts.’

  ‘By his account, don’t you mean?’ Vi snapped. ‘According to Mr and Mrs Davies when they telephoned us this morning from the village post office, they’ve been off their heads with worry about him. And if he’s been that unhappy why on earth didn’t he write and tell us instead of causing all this trouble.’

  ‘They told me that you didn’t want me, and that was why you didn’t write to me,’ said Jack.

  The adults looked at Jack with varying emotions in their hearts.

  Jean could see that Vi wasn’t looking at all pleased that he had spoken up, and although she said crossly, ‘That’s nonsense. Of course I wrote to you,’ Jean suspected that she had not written as regularly as she would want them to think.

  It had been ever such a relief when Francine had finally returned. Jean had really thought at one stage that she wasn’t go
ing to.

  ‘Well, obviously the lad can’t go back to these people,’ said Sam firmly. ‘And if I was you, Edwin, I’d be writing to whoever is in charge of this private evacuation lot you used and reporting them. I reckon the woman who took her kids away got it right, and that Jack here deserves a pat on the back for having the good sense to do what he did. It seems to me that these Davies people were just using their evacuees as unpaid labour, aye and getting paid for it by their families and the Government as well, seeing as the Government gives them as take the kids a bit of an allowance. I dare say you and Vi paid a fair bit more to make sure that Jack was looked after properly as well, and I shouldn’t like to think that someone was cheating me out of my money like that.’

  Jean listened to Sam in admiration. He had got exactly the right way of dealing with Edwin and appealing to what mattered most to him – his bank account. She could almost see Edwin puffing out his chest and mentally preparing the letter he would send to the Davieses, demanding his money back. She gave Sam a grateful look.

  Vi had started to frown.

  ‘And what’s that Jack’s wearing, might I ask, because those certainly aren’t his clothes?’

  ‘No, I bought him some new things when we were out,’ Francine told her. ‘What he was wearing were little better than rags, weren’t they, Jean?’

  ‘He’d certainly outgrown them,’ Jean agreed diplomatically.

  Vi pounced triumphantly. ‘Well, if he’s grown then he certainly can’t have been as badly treated as he’s told you. If you’ve been lying to your aunt Jean, Jack—’

  ‘I haven’t. It’s true, all of it.’

  Francine could hear the panic in his voice and moved closer to him whilst Jean’s heart sank. Didn’t Vi have any tact? Couldn’t she see what she was doing? And poor little Jack – he was the one who was going to suffer the most because of all this upset.

  ‘Well, you’d better come home with us now until we sort out somewhere else for you to go.’