by Clare Harvey
‘There it is,’ the doctor said at last. ‘Yes, that’s a good steady heartbeat. How many months did you say you thought you were?’ She straightened up and placed the ear trumpet on the mantelpiece, next to the carriage clock.
‘Three,’ said Vi.
‘Oh, I shouldn’t be surprised if you’re further along than that,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s rare to feel the baby move before about four months, especially if it’s your first one,’ the doctor said, and went over to sit behind her big desk. ‘You can get up, now, dear.’
Vi heaved herself up from the chaise longue and pulled her frock down over the curve of her stomach, feeling her breasts tug, pendulous and tender, squeezed into the too-tight brassiere. She thought of the airman, the bang of the bunk beds against the dormitory wall. And she thought of Frank Timpson and the rough-rub of the bricks in the alley. Could she be more than three months gone already? But everyone knew you couldn’t get pregnant if you did it standing up and it was your first time. She left one button undone – it just wouldn’t stretch that far any more. It didn’t matter when she was at work. Those overalls would disguise her condition for months.
As Vi walked across the rag rug towards the doctor’s desk, she noticed scurrying shoes at eye level beyond the basement window. She could hear the clatter of saucepans and smell frying onions from an adjoining room. The carriage clock chimed five times. Dr Gibbs was rearranging the pen, ruler and notepad on her desk. She looked up and motioned for Vi to sit down. Vi sat, and clasped her hands on her knees. The onion smell was making her feel nauseous. Dr Gibbs glanced down at Vi’s hands. ‘I see you’ve not persuaded him to make an honest woman of you,’ she said. ‘But there’s still time, dear. Unless you’ve given some thought to the alternatives.’
‘About that,’ Vi said. The doctor gave a slow nod, to show she was listening. ‘I don’t want to have it adopted.’ She could see the doctor’s face harden. ‘But what about that other way. You said you could have a baby looked after, just until you could get it back?’ The doctor pressed her thin lips together in a discouraging way. ‘Because the baby’s father is dead, you see.’
‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry to hear that.’
‘And I can’t afford to stop working, not at the moment, because I have to send most of my wages home.’
‘Oh dear.’ Dr Gibbs shifted her pencil and ruler round on her desk, so they swapped places. She took a deep intake of breath. ‘And when exactly do you think you will be able to afford to?’
‘I don’t know. Once Ma’s medical bills are paid off, and when Rita’s old enough to enlist. The twins have got paper rounds now, so that helps. Maybe in a year or so?’ Her voice wavered. She sounded unconvincing, even to herself.
‘Are you certain you won’t consider adoption? With money so tight could you ever afford to be a good mother to this child? Wouldn’t adoption be the better option?’
‘Better for who?’ Vi said.
‘For whom,’ Dr Gibbs corrected her grammar. ‘Better for whom.’ She smiled one of her flat-mouthed smiles that held no warmth. ‘Better for the child to be brought up in an educated and nurturing environment, wouldn’t you say?’
‘But I want to be able to get my baby back.’
‘And by the time you are able, he or she may very well not be a baby any more, and may be perfectly well settled in their foster family.’
‘That’s the word: foster. I want to have it fostered. You said you could do it. That’s what you said before.’
The doctor sucked in a breath, paused, then picked up her pencil and opened her notebook. ‘Very well. You have made your choice,’ she said, writing something down. She looked up. ‘My only concern now is the health of the child. Nobody will want to look after a defective baby for you. If your plan is to have it fostered, then you need to ensure its health, that’s all. I’ll mention it to management when I’m in on Thursday.’
‘Don’t,’ Vi said. ‘Please.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, young lady, but I feel duty bound—’
‘I’ll do it myself. I’ll tell them today.’ Vi’s words came out in a rush.
‘Well, that’s your choice, but if you don’t, then I shall,’ Dr Gibbs said, shutting the notebook. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, the surgery is closing.’
Chapter 24
Laura
‘Good turn-out, wasn’t it?’ she said, letting her hand rest on the leather inlay of his desk and casting her eye round the room: stacks and stacks of framed artwork leaning up against the flocked wallpaper like an interrupted card game. They had just got back from the unveiling of her painting: ‘Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech Ring’ at the Royal Academy. Young Ruby had come along herself, all the way from Wales, dear thing, and there’d been a whole army of journalists and photographers. Even Pathé had turned up. ‘What do you think the press will say?’ She leant her portfolio against the edge of the desk (he hadn’t asked why she’d brought it with her, and she hadn’t told him, not yet).
‘They will say that Dame Laura has infused an urgency and vitality into this study, making permanent a vivid impression of how girls in the Second World War toiled to make victory certain,’ K said, smoothing down his hair. Laura smiled. He knew how to play the game, all right. ‘So that’s what Harold will read in the papers tomorrow. Or on a newsreel, if he makes an excursion to Malvern to the flicks.’ K gave her a sharp look, and Laura felt heat rising in her chest. He continued before she’d thought to respond: ‘And, yes, it was a good turn-out. Everyone likes an excuse to come up to town, escape the evacuee mentality of the provinces, no?’ Laura nodded.
‘I say, what do you think to this?’ He motioned to an unframed canvas propped against the wall behind his desk. It showed army tailors at work in a barracks. The perspective was interesting, how it looked down at the tops of their heads. ‘It’s by an ATS girl: Stella Schmolle. I don’t think it’s half bad, actually. You?’
Laura squinted at the painting with her head on one side. The composition was excellent, but the colours – she needed to work on using colour more effectively. On the other hand, it was a unique style. ‘Interesting,’ Laura said.
‘Really?’ He raised an eyebrow.
‘I wasn’t being catty, K, I think she shows promise.’
‘Yes, I rather think so, too. Then we’ll buy it, and tell her CO to make sure she gets the time to do more.’ He turned away from the painting to face her, rubbing his hands together. ‘So, how’s tricks?’ He leant against his desk, shoving one of the snowdrift piles of paperwork out of the way. His dark hair was slicked smooth against his neat skull. He was slender as a cigarillo in his brown Italian wool suit.
Laura paused before answering. ‘Fine,’ she said at last.
‘And Harold?’
She didn’t answer, and he didn’t pursue it. She walked around to the other side of the desk and he rushed round to pull out the chair for her, apologising for not having offered her a seat sooner. Say what you like about K, Laura thought (and people did say things about K, and about his wife, too, if one cared to listen), he was nothing if not courteous.
There was banging from an adjoining room. ‘Sorry about that. Framers – I know it’s a terrible racket, but I do like to keep an eye on them,’ K said, with an apologetic shrug.
Laura settled herself into the large chair with the leather-padded seat and arm rests, and took off her gloves. She took one of K’s expensive cigarettes from the ivory box, and let him light it for her. She noticed him glance at her left hand as he did so, and wondered, briefly, whether she should claim rheumatism for the absence of the ring. No. She wasn’t going to lie to him, or to anyone else. Besides, if he thought her fingers were seizing up, he’d think twice about offering her another commission, and she needed the work.
She looked out of K’s office window to the brown-grey tumble of London rooftops and the lowering skies: smog smothering down, as usual. She leant back in his seat and looked up at K, handsome as a film star (not that it did anything for
her, Laura thought, even if she had been twenty years younger).
‘The Committee still owes me for the Nottingham commission. I thought it vulgar to bring up during the press junket, but now we’re in private, and there we are.’
‘There we are indeed,’ K said, raising those handsome brows again. ‘But I never received a painting from ROF Nottingham.’
‘You know fine well why not,’ Laura said. ‘It was in all the papers – even if you hadn’t bothered to read the letter I sent.’
‘Yes, it was regrettable,’ he said.
‘Regrettable? It was a tragedy, K. That poor woman had just got married, was due to go on her honeymoon.’
K cleared his throat. ‘Yes, dreadful business. But you see, Laura, I can’t pay for something I don’t have. The rules are that I pay for the finished piece, not for the work that goes into it. It’s taxpayers’ money, old girl.’
‘Show your taxpayers this, then, K.’ Laura pulled the triangular scrap of charred canvas from her pocket and banged it down, causing an avalanche of paperwork to slew across the desk.
K sighed. ‘I’m so sorry, but I just can’t, Laura.’
‘What about this, then?’ She pulled at the ties on the portfolio and opened it up. ‘I went back to the factory, talked to everyone who was there. I only painted it for myself, but it is something, K. There is something to show for that commission.’
‘Do you mind if I—’ Without waiting for her response, Sir Kenneth took it out of the portfolio and held it up.
‘Laura, it’s—’
‘Chalk, charcoal and watercolour,’ Laura said.
‘That’s not what I meant. What I was going to say is that it’s wonderfully powerful – the burnt debris, the expressions on those people’s faces.’
‘It’s not at all what you asked for,’ Laura said. ‘And I was just going to keep it for my personal collection, but—’
‘We must have it,’ Sir Kenneth said, holding it up, walking across the room to the window with it. ‘It’s perfect.’
‘It’s not a double Ruby Loftus, and that’s what you asked for.’
‘No, I’m afraid I still can’t pay you for the original commission. But I can pay you for this. We can posterise it, add text, roll it out across all the munitions factories in the country, to warn of the dangers at work, factory fires and so forth. It’s exactly the kind of thing the chaps at the ministry have been asking for.’
‘But it’s not a factory fire. It’s the aftermath of a bombing raid. I only painted it as a way of making sense of the tragedy in my own mind.’
‘And that’s why it will work, because it is so personal. It’s not some hectoring man from the ministry wagging his finger; it’s a testament to the real anguish that workplace incidents can cause. If anything’s going to make people clean up their rubbish and turn their machines off properly, it’s something like this.’ He turned back from the window and came towards the desk.
‘I’m not sure I want to sell it,’ Laura said. K did the eyebrow thing again and placed the painting down on the desk. He pulled a chequebook from his pocket.
‘How much?’
‘It’s not for sale.’
‘Laura, how much?’
‘Four hundred pounds.’
‘Two hundred?’
‘I couldn’t possibly part with it for less than three hundred guineas.’
‘Three hundred pounds?’
‘Done.’
He opened the chequebook and took a pen from his top pocket. As he unclipped the lid and reached towards the open cheque, Laura stayed his hand. ‘Come on now, I’m overpaying as it is. There’ll be a riot if the others find out how much you’re getting for this, so keep it under your hat, won’t you? Right then, three hundred pounds to Mr and Mrs Knight . . .’
She tightened her grasp, making him pause. ‘It’s not that. Could you, just this once, not—’
‘Squirrel fund?’ he interrupted, looking pointedly at the space on her finger where the ring should have been. He thought she needed the money to set herself up independently, or shack up with some lover in a seedy apartment? The impertinence!
‘Not at all,’ she replied, lifting her hand. ‘Could you leave the cheque blank, if you would?’
‘As you wish,’ K said, glancing up and giving her a look. Judging her by his own low moral standards, most likely. Laura looked away. He could think what he liked. Only she would ever know where that money was destined.
Violet
‘Looks like snowfall, so it does,’ Mary said. They were walking along Attenborough Lane. Above the charcoal outline of the church, the sky hung low and grey with pulpy cloud, and a stiff breeze shook leaves from the trees like multicoloured snowflakes.
Vi’s coat buttons were undone to give her pregnant belly space. The autumn air was chill against the stretched flesh, and her swollen breasts had started to ache. A single magpie flew overhead, chuckle-chuntering as it went. ‘Is it far?’ Vi said.
‘We’re almost there, now.’
‘Thank you for coming all this way with me, Mary.’
‘Couldn’t have you coming alone. Miss Fitzlord brought me, when it was my time.’
‘She was good like that, wasn’t she?’
‘Aye, she was.’
They walked on in silence for a while. Vi’s bag banged against her calf, and she looked down at her feet in her God-awful factory clogs trudging along the pavement: clump-clump-clump. Then she looked up again, at the swirling leaves, making a grab for one as it fell. She looked over and saw that Mary was doing the same. They caught each other’s eyes and laughed out loud. Vi dropped her bag, opened her arms wide, in a huge ‘V’ shape like the woman in the recruitment poster, and spun slowly round, trying to catch a falling leaf. ‘It’s a whole month of good luck next year, for each one you catch,’ she called out, still spinning, keeping her eyes fixed upwards into the yellow-brown rush of it. And she kept her head looking skywards, grabbing the falling leaves, as Mary talked about how they drifted so thick in the glen near her home that they’d sledged on them on old tin trays, like snow, and about how her brother Billy had fallen off and got a gash in his head when he whacked into a tree branch.
Vi spun and leapt, still trying to catch leaves. She had ten already – she’d always been quick with her hands. ‘I used to use a tin tray, too, not on leaves though, just when it snowed,’ Vi said, grinning at the memory of winters at home. There, she’d caught her eleventh. Just one left to get. ‘I nicked it from the back of the school kitchen. Pa called me a tea leaf, but he never made me give it back.’ She remembered the white blur, laughter bubbling up, the rush of speed. Bruised to buggery afterwards, but happy. She had had a happy childhood, despite it all, she thought, spinning even faster now, dizzy as hell. There, that was the last one. She shoved it in her coat pocket with the others.
She and Mary fell into each other, chortling like drunkards. They slumped together against the gatepost, waiting for the world to stop turning. She caught Mary’s eye and they laughed afresh. What were they doing, grown, responsible women, with jobs and all, behaving like snow-struck schoolgirls? As their giggles petered out, Vi spoke: ‘I’m sorry, Mary.’
‘What for?’
‘I wasn’t very nice to you at first. I just didn’t realise—’
Mary made a swiping gesture with her hand, like shooing away a fly. ‘Oh, that’s all in the past, so it is.’ And Mary hooked her arm through Vi’s and tugged her onwards, towards an orangey blur on the left-hand side, a three-storey red-brick Victorian villa: Cloud House.
Mary pecked Vi on the cheek as they parted company in the open doorway, but she turned her head and walked quickly away when the woman holding the door open tutted and said something about letting all the cold air in. ‘Thank you again for bringing me,’ Vi called out as the door slammed shut. She wasn’t sure if Mary had heard her or not. She shoved her free hand in her pocket: twelve fallen leaves – a whole year of good luck? Fat lot of good those leaves would do
her here.
It was very dark in the hallway. ‘You’re late,’ the woman said.
‘Only about nine months,’ Vi said, but the woman didn’t laugh. As Vi’s eyes became accustomed to the darkness of the hallway, she was able to see the woman more clearly: tiny, darting eyes and oily, scraped-back hair. The woman tutted again. ‘It’s that kind of attitude that got you into your condition in the first place, I’ll bet,’ she said.
Vi sighed and picked up her bag. ‘Can you show me to my room?’ she said.
‘I can, but don’t get too comfy. All of you girls are going to church in five minutes, and after that you’ll be assigned your duties.’
George
‘Please tell Marjorie that it’s a very kind offer, but I have other plans.’ He could hardly bear to meet Bill’s eyes. Again Bill Simmons had invited him over, and again he was refusing. This was the third time, now.
Bill nodded. ‘Well, game birds are off-ration, so there’ll be plenty to go round if you change your mind. We’d all love to see you.’
George made a non-committal grunt. The suffocating kindness of it was too much. He turned away and began checking the updated charts. Production was down again, for the third week running. Bill was still at the desk, shuffling a report into his briefcase. He looked over at George. ‘Can’t keep up with demand,’ he said, shrugging. ‘It’s impossible. They will keep going off and having babies and the replacements don’t come in fast enough. And when they do, they’re about as much use as a chocolate teapot for the first few weeks. You know how it is. Still, girls will be girls, I suppose. What can you do?’
Indeed, what could one do? George thought of Violet Smith, who’d gone off to the Home for Unmarried Mothers, and there was still no news from the Labour Exchange about providing cover. He ran his hand over his face, feeling the rough scratch of stubble. He should have shaved before coming out, but it had slipped his mind, just as it had slipped his mind to eat Mrs Packer’s sandwiches, again.
‘Well, other than the woeful shortage of workers, there are no major incidents to report.’ He clicked the catch on his briefcase. It was only a quarter to six, but Bill had a reason to hurry home: a wife, supper on the table, bedtime stories for the boys.