Van happened to be staying at Owen’s shop late in September when Paul arrived in the early hours of the morning.
‘Where’s she to? Where’s Van?’ he demanded. ‘Come on escort duty I did, fiddled it I did, so I could see her and I’m not moving from here till I do!’
Cecily and Ada were in their dressing gowns and behind them stood Phil, a raised poker in his trembling hand. ‘Just in case,’ as he’d put it, before they’d opened the door. And from Paul’s expression and obvious rage, he might just need it.
‘Where is she?’ Paul’s voice rose higher and louder as he began to suspect they weren’t going to let him see her. ‘What’s this about her expecting a baby, then? I can tell you straight off it isn’t mine.’ He pushed the oddly immobile trio aside and stormed into the living room, filling it with his anger and throwing his rucksack across the room in fury.
‘Nice, isn’t it, to get a letter from “a well-wisher” telling me my girl is expecting? Well, there’s no knowing whose it is but I do know it isn’t mine. We never did anything, see, not once!’
He became aware of the silence. He looked at the sisters, who were both standing with hands to their faces, their eyes wide with shock. ‘Don’t pretend you didn’t know.’
‘But we don’t, I mean, it isn’t true. You’ve been misinformed. Van is perfectly well and she isn’t going to have a baby. How could she if what you say is true?’
‘I’ll soon find out. Where is she? Tell me or I’ll start smashing the place up!’
The door opened. ‘I’m here, Paul. I didn’t expect you home so soon. There’s a lovely surprise.’ She went to him and raised her face for his kiss but instead Paul slapped her so hard she staggered.
Phil, who had not let go of the poker, raised it higher and threatened the soldier. ‘Leave her alone, boy! Talk you can, talk you must, but don’t touch her again or I’ll – I’ll swing for you!’ Brave words but he was clearly terrified.
It seemed to Cecily later that the tableau remained fixed for an age, but it was probably only seconds before Paul sank into a chair and covered his face with his hands.
‘How did you find out?’ Van asked.
At once his head shot up and he demanded, ‘Whose is it?’
‘None of your business. The father is going to be told by me, not some clecking busybody. The same as I wanted to tell you, privately, next time we met.’
Peter came down then and a hurriedly whispered explanation took place between him and Cecily. But it was Phil, braver since Paul’s capitulation to his poker, who seemed to take control of the situation. He was visibly shaking but said firmly to Cecily, Ada and Peter, ‘Come on, we’ll go out and let them talk. But,’ he threatened the much larger man who sat staring at Van, ‘stay well away from her, right? We’ll go into the shop but I’ll be watching through the window and if you go nearer than you are now, I’ll knock your head from your shoulders, big as you are. Right?’
Cecily and Peter stared in disbelief at the small, obviously terrified man. Ada was tearful with pride.
Paul seemed unable to retaliate. He nodded agreement and waited until the room had emptied and Phil, whom he could have broken without effort, was standing, looking through the window, his weasely face pressed close to the glass.
‘Why, Van?’ Paul asked, all the fight gone from him. ‘Why couldn’t you wait for me?’
‘This is nothing to do with you and I,’ Van told him calmly. ‘This is my baby. I’ll understand if you want to end our engagement – even if you haven’t been faithful to me while you’ve been away.’ There was an edge to her voice as she spoke the last words.
‘It’s different for a man,’ Paul muttered, glancing up at Phil’s white face to see if he’d heard. ‘I hate you for doing this to me,’ he added with a growl. He went to rise but urgent tapping on the glass stopped him. Phil raised an imperious finger, his lips tight in disapproval. ‘You’ve made a fool of me. All that talk about how we’d wait till we were married and all the time you were cheating on me. Damn it all, I’ve only been gone a couple of months. Shamed I am. Shamed.’
‘Oh, come on, Paul. You won’t be the only one coming back from war to a pregnant wife or girlfriend. The town’s full of them. And half of them are Americans. Accept it or go away.’
‘I hate you for doing this.’
‘Then go. I’m not frightened at the prospect of being an unmarried mother. My own mother survived it and so will I.’
‘Tell me who it is.’
‘No.’
‘Then I’ll tell you! It’s Edwin flaming Richards!’
‘Who told you?’ For the first time Van seemed alarmed.
‘Let’s say a friend. Although he was hardly that, but that was how he signed his letter. It must be someone you know for him to care enough to write or to know where to send the letter.’
‘But this wasn’t confirmed until a few days ago.’
‘Women get sick, don’t they? And there are other signs,’ he sneered.
‘Then it’s someone very close.’ They both turned to look at the thin, white face still pressed against the window. Van frowned. ‘But there’s no way he could …’
Phil jumped up and entered the room. ‘Finished talking, have you? I’ll go and get you a cup of tea. I expect Peter and the girls have got it organized.’ He went through the passageway to the back kitchen and called back, ‘Behave yourselves, mind!’
When he returned with Ada, Cecily, Peter and the tray of tea, the tinkling of the shop bell indicated that Paul was gone and Van was alone.
‘Why, Van?’ Cecily asked. ‘Please tell me this isn’t part of your urge to punish me. At least tell me that.’
‘Have a baby to get back at you, Cecily?’ Phil said. ‘What importance you place on yourself!’
‘Shut up!’ Van glared at him. ‘You’ve done enough damage.’
‘Phil?’ Ada demanded. ‘What has Phil to do with any of this?’
‘It was you who wrote to Paul, wasn’t it?’ Van accused.
She ran upstairs, leaving them all asking questions and trying to sort out the truth from Phil’s denials and his offence at their not understanding the honourable motive of whoever had.
Without stopping to do more than brush her hair, Van dressed and ran through the shop, leaving the door open and up the hill to Watkins’. It was still early but she busied herself until the staff arrived and spent the morning doing the jobs she liked least, every moment expecting to be told there was a soldier to see her. But Paul didn’t come, and Cecily failed to come to work.
Beryl and Bertie were away – the reason she was sleeping at the shop – but she decided it was preferable to sleep in the empty house rather than face the barrage of questions waiting for her at home. So when the shop closed she went to the big, empty house overlooking the docks. There, with the post, was a note from Paul: ‘I’m going back to think about this. We’ll talk on my next leave.’
It was signed just ‘Paul’.
Back in August, Paris had been liberated and the scenes that followed were repeated through other towns as the Allies marched through, heading for Berlin. A week after Paul returned to his unit, he was among the first to enter a newly liberated town and he walked through the streets and accepted the adulation and kisses of the population, and witnessed the unfurling of hundreds of French and British flags which had been hidden ready for the day the Germans were driven out. A sniper hiding in the ruins of a barn fired only once before being killed by a sharp-eyed British soldier but his bullet had liberated Paul from his decision whether or not to marry Van.
When she went to visit Kitty and was told the unbelievable news of Paul’s death, Van didn’t cry. She went in cold anger to see Phil and shouted at him, ‘He needn’t have known! If he had to die, then he could at least have died happy and without the worry of this!’ She hit her stomach in anguish. ‘You’re evil and insane. Why did you have to interfere?’
She allowed Cecily to take her to her old room and she sli
d fully dressed under the counterpane and lay there, staring at the walls and wondering why she had allowed ‘Blodwen’ to happen. Had it really been some distorted urge to punish her mother by shaming her and make her watch the same ordeal again, by proxy? Was she so determined to prove how much better she’d deal with the problem?
The simple solution was to go at once to Beryl and Bertie and tell them. They wouldn’t be angry; they’d allow her to talk it through, and knowing it was Edwin’s child would give them further involvement. They had always supported her, as when she asked them not to tell Edwin about her engagement to Paul. They had understood then her desire to tell Edwin personally, rather than let him hear in a letter. Although, sadly, in that instance, as in this, Phil had frustrated her intention.
She didn’t go straightaway to the Richards to tell them. Edwin and ‘Blodwen’ could be dealt with later. Now there was Paul’s death to cope with.
Many suspicious people believed that births and death come together in a family, and although Paul was not family, Ada strengthened the myth by joining his death with the birth of Annette’s fourth child. It was a boy, and they called him Bertie and asked Bertie and Beryl and Van to be his godparents.
Chapter Twelve
AS 1945 CAME in, Cecily and Ada remembered all the other New Years which had seemed to herald such an exciting beginning. This one held greater promise that any they could remember. The war seemed truly about to end and even the news that Danny and Gareth were prisoners seemed less frightening than it would have been years or even months ago.
‘It won’t be for long,’ Peter consoled them whenever they admitted to being afraid for them. He read the news avidly and reported all the hopeful signs of approaching victory.
‘It’s wonderful to think they might be home for Easter,’ Ada said.
‘Be murdered before that,’ Phil muttered. ‘That Hitler won’t allow prisoners to survive. Waste money feeding the enemy? What does he care for a lot of British and Americans and all the others who have helped us to victory? What does he gain by handing them back?’
He glared at Cecily, who told him to hush.
They ignored his comments and instead thought of the friends who they wouldn’t see again – poor Jack Simmons, who had run the shop next door to provide cheap food for the poorest families, and Paul.
As April approached, Cecily asked her daughter, now heavily pregnant, what she wanted for a twenty-first birthday present.
‘Nothing.’
‘You must have a special gift for your twenty-first, Van, lovey, it’s such a special date. I thought we could all go out and have a celebratory meal.’
‘No.’
‘But why?’ Cecily pleaded. ‘Expecting a baby doesn’t alter the fact that you’ve reached the age of consent and you’ll inherit Waldo’s shop with all the money and power that will bring. Surely you’ll want to mark the day with a party or something?’
‘No. I’ll mark the day all right, but in my own time. On my birthday I’m going to stay home with Auntie Beryl and Uncle Bertie. Just me,’ she added firmly when Cecily tried to speak. ‘Edwin says he’ll try to phone me there. That’s all I’m doing for the moment. Later, I’ll have a very special celebration.’
‘Will we be invited to that?’ Cecily asked sarcastically.
‘Oh, yes.’ Van’s eyes shone in suppressed excitement. ‘You’ll be invited to that one all right!’
Cecily wondered what it was about the statement that made her uneasy.
‘You’re imagining things,’ Peter said when she told him of her apprehension. ‘Having a baby, the confusion of her feelings for Edwin and Paul, Paul’s death, it’s all mixed up in her head and she’ll need time to unsnarl it, bit by bit.’
Van’s birthday was not what she planned at all. She woke early in the morning and the pains began, low in her back. She lay there for a while, trying to remember what Annette had told her, not wanting to rouse anyone or have doctors fussing her too soon. But by seven o’clock she knew she needed help and she called Beryl.
The baby was born, a few weeks prematurely, at three in the afternoon, in the room Beryl and Van had prepared; the room that had once been Edwin’s nursery. It was a boy and Van said he would be called Richard.
‘But if you marry Edwin, he’ll be Richard Richards. Would you want that?’
‘And if I don’t marry Edwin he’ll be Richard Owen,’ Van replied in a voice that forbade further discussion.
The maid was sent with a message to Cecily written by Van, telling her of the birth of the baby and adding that, in a few days, she would invite her to see him, but at the moment she and Beryl were far too busy to cope with visitors.
Cecily read it and cried.
An hour later, she left the office at Waldo’s store and went to Beryl and Bertie’s house, banging furiously on the door. A surprised Beryl opened it. ‘Cecily! I’m so glad you decided to come, Van was upset when you said you were too busy.’ Luckily Cecily had Van’s note and she showed it to Beryl, who read it without a word.
They went together to where Van was sitting with the baby in a cot beside her and she looked startled when her mother came in. She said nothing as Cecily looked at the baby then picked him up and held him.
‘He’s to be called Richard,’ Beryl told her.
‘Richard Richards?’
‘We don’t know about that,’ Beryl said, shaking her head as warning to Cecily not to say any more.
The two friends went downstairs and sat for a while talking about the resentment Van felt for her mother. ‘She seems to be getting worse, but I wonder if having a child of her own might make her soften towards me,’ Cecily said. But a look at Beryl’s face showed her that her friend had as little hope of that as she did herself.
Three weeks later, Van was back at the store, to Cecily’s concern and Beryl’s disappointment. Jennifer, the young girl who had worked at the store, had agreed to become Richard’s nursemaid and Beryl prepared a room for her next to the nursery.
Cecily had grown fonder of Peter as the years passed. He worked long hours at his garage, where he employed a young man on a temporary basis until Johnny Fowler came back from the war. At Johnny and Sharon’s wedding, he had promised Johnny a job and he had no intention of letting the man down. With the house, where Sharon and her three girls waited for him, Johnny would have a good start after his years away.
Because of his refusal to get more help, he would leave the shop before six each morning to open the garage. It was often seven in the evening before he returned. Besides servicing the few vans and cars still managing to get petrol, he also repaired bicycles, prams and pushchairs for women without husbands to do the jobs. He sharpened knives and, sometimes with Willie helping, fixed clocks and garden mowers, never refusing any demands on his skills and time.
Milk vans were allowed to work only in specified zones, being given areas of streets in which to deliver, commensurate with the size of their pre-war business. This cut down on petrol and also, to the roundsmen’s delight, made it easier to collect payment, as there was no second firm waiting for the business if a customer got into debt. Because Peter was quick and utterly reliable, most of the milkmen took their vans to him, so they wouldn’t be without a vehicle longer than the finish of one day and the start of the next.
Cecily saw how tired he was on some days and would fuss over him, spoil him and take great pleasure in finding and cooking his favourite food. She was hurt and irritated when Phil, who occasionally managed to buy a fresh salmon from an illegal source, refused to bring any more once he had learned how much Peter enjoyed it. He made the excuse that he was endangering the farmer who offered them.
‘I know that isn’t true,’ Cecily said angrily. ‘It’s knowing I want it for Peter, isn’t it?’
Ada hotly denied this but Cecily knew from the way Phil relished any disappointment in her life that for some unimaginable reason his dislike of her was not lessening with the years. That inexplicable dislike had never been mo
re apparent than one day when he was in the stables where he sometimes stabled the horse he still occasionally borrowed. He had been grooming the animal, talking to it in conspiratorial whispers when he saw Cecily and Peter in a close embrace amid the diminished stock and the empty boxes.
‘Disgusting,’ he said in a low, growling voice he used to show disapproval.
‘What’s that, Phil?’ Cecily asked, hugging Peter tight. ‘What have you heard straight from the horse’s mouth then?’ She was blatantly rude to him at times, not trying to cover up his strange behaviour, but talking about his long silences and his frowning stare and the way he would sometimes appear to be talking to someone who wasn’t there. She didn’t believe he was seriously ill, just playing games with her.
‘You! That’s what!’ he said now. ‘You’re disgusting! Carrying on like that at your age. It’s forty you are, woman, not sixteen. A fine example you’ve shown that daughter of yours. No wonder she’s a floozy, getting pregnant. Sure it was Edwin, are you? Could have been an American. Handsome they are, and they pay well, don’t they? Five pairs of nylons she’d got upstairs. Five pairs!’
‘How dare you go through her things?’ Cecily shouted, but Peter pulled her away, across the yard and into the living room.
‘Don’t rouse him more than he is already, love,’ he warned quietly. ‘I really think he’s going to flip one day. I just hope you aren’t the catalyst. Best you leave him be.’
‘It’s an act. And I can’t let him say those things about Van,’ she protested angrily. ‘He’s been putting his grubby hands through her things. How dare he do that!’
‘Please love, you must ignore it. Phil is unbalanced, a real danger if things don’t go his way. Believe me, he’s not a well man. Promise me you’ll ignore anything he says. I worry about you being here with him while I’m at the garage.’
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