by Annie Groves
Emily had tried to behave as normally as possible, not asking him anything, just going about their normal routine, and gradually the stiffness and the fear that had him constantly looking towards the door had eased out of him.
They had talked about what happened, her and Wilhelm, after Tommy had gone to bed.
‘What shall I do if Tommy is hers, and she tries to take him from me?’ she had asked, but Wilhelm had not been able to answer her.
Now, though, looking down at Tommy’s sleeping face in the faint light from his nightlight, Emily understood that she already knew what she must do. Tommy’s happiness was far more important to her than anything else, far more important than her own. She tried to think how she might feel were she a child who had thought its true mother lost and who had gone through all that Tommy had gone through. Surely such a child would be overjoyed to be reunited with its mother, and not run away from her? If the woman tried to take Tommy away, she would not let him go until and unless she was sure he wanted to be with her, Emily decided fiercely. If she was his mother and he wanted to be with her then she would have to let him go, but even if she was his mother and he didn’t – then she wouldn’t. But how would she know what he really wanted? Tommy was a loyal little soul who knew how much he meant to her.
She was going to have to talk to him properly Emily realised, no matter how painful that was for both of them.
‘Mum?’ The sound of Tommy’s voice brought Emily from her light sleep in the chair beside his bed. His hand was clutching hers, his voice anxious.
‘Yes, I’m here, love,’ she reassured him.
‘You won’t let anyone take me away from you, will you, and go and live with them?’
‘I won’t let anyone make you do anything you don’t want to do, Tommy. Not anyone,’ Emily stressed.
Tommy exhaled and went silent.
‘Why don’t you tell me all about what happened before you and me met, Tommy?’ Emily suggested gently.
‘You won’t send me back to them, my mum and dad?’
‘I won’t do anything ever that you don’t want me to do, Tommy,’ Emily told him truthfully. ‘But that lady we saw today – your mum was she—’
‘No. Not my mum, she’s my auntie. I liked her. She was kind to me, but she promised…They never wanted me, my mum and dad, they were always saying what a nuisance I was. When the war started they sent me away to this farm. The farmer made us work hard and there was never enough food. I ran away, but they made me go back. They said I had to be evacuated and that I was making a fuss over nothing. They said that because the farmer had told them that I’d caused him a lot of trouble I’d be going to another farm. They said it would be best for me on account of the war, but really it was because they didn’t like me and because I was a nuisance. My mother said that she wasn’t surprised that the farmer got angry with me and my father said that I deserved a good hiding.’
Emily’s hand tightened around Tommy’s, maternal fury burning inside her chest at the thought of such inhuman cruelty to her precious boy.
‘So you ran away, did you, after you’d been evacuated again, and came back to Liverpool?’
Tommy nodded. ‘There was a bomb. It hit the farm. I was frightened that they’d send me to another farm if I stayed, so I left.’
Emily had always known that he must have a family somewhere but she’d assumed that he had either become separated from them or they had been killed, never dreaming that he had been treated with such unkindness that he had preferred to live rough rather than go home. The story Tommy had given her, though, was a child’s story told from a child’s perspective. His parents might in reality be desperately grieving for him. That woman today had looked at him with so much yearning in her eyes, and according to Tommy she was only his aunt. She would be back, Emily knew, and when she came she would try to take Tommy from her.
‘Your mum and dad—’ she began.
But Tommy stopped her, insisting emotionally, ‘You’re my mum now, not her. I won’t go back to them, I won’t.’ His voice rose and filled with a panic that caused the dog to get up off the floor and move protectively towards him.
She felt so much happier now that things were back to normal between her and Sasha, Lou acknowledged as she sat down on the edge of her bed back at her base at Thame, to read her mail.
The sun coming in through the narrow leaded window of her room threw small oblongs of light across the oak floor, the now familiar smell of old house and dust making her nose itch. As her room was at the end of the corridor the comings and goings of the other girls who shared the accommodation were muted to her, the sounds of footsteps on the bare wooden stairs, the opening and closing of doors, the voices of her fellow ATA pilots only just audible on the still air.
Her room felt cold after her absence. They weren’t allowed to light fires in the huge fireplaces in their rooms because of the risk of the old wing of the house catching fire, but it was tempting to imagine just how cosy the room would have been with a fire burning in the grate. In your dreams, Lou mocked herself. Even if having a fire wasn’t banned, coal itself was rationed. She looked back at the post she was holding, frowning slightly at the unfamiliar writing on one of the envelopes. Curiously, she opened the letter.
I need to see you a.s.a.p. I’ve got a pass for 20 Jan, and I think I can borrow a car from a pal so I’ll drive over and pick you up, hopefully just before lunch.
It was signed ‘Kieran’.
What did Kieran mean, he ‘needed’ to see her? Lou felt both irritated and anxious. Why hadn’t he explained why he ‘needed’ to see her?
‘Have you decided what you’re going to wear on New Year’s Eve yet?’ The sound of June’s voice had Lou stuffing Kieran’s letter into her pocket out of sight, guiltily reminded of the way she had deceived her friend.
‘I don’t think Jean really approves of what I’m doing,’ Francine told Marcus as they walked towards the pretty row of cottages where Emily – and Jack – lived.
It hadn’t taken long for Francine to find out Emily’s address. Whitchurch was only a small place, and when she’d telephoned this morning to say that she wanted to talk to her, Francine had got the impression that the other woman hadn’t been surprised.
Of course, she’d told the others what had happened the minute they’d arrived at Grace and Seb’s, and Grace herself had then admitted that she had thought that she’d seen a boy in Whitchurch who looked uncannily like Jack.
‘I wouldn’t get your hopes up, Fran,’ Jean had cautioned her. ‘This boy probably just has a look of Jack, that’s all.’
‘No, it was Jack. I could tell from the way he looked at me before he ran away that he recognised me.’
‘She just doesn’t want you to be disappointed, or hurt,’ Marcus told her.
‘Hurt?’ Fran looked at him.
‘The boy ran away when he saw you, Fran,’ he reminded her gently. ‘You’ve said yourself that he had a rotten life with your sister and her husband. He’s old enough to have been able to say who his family are and where they are, but obviously he has chosen not to do so.’
‘But, Marcus, he’s my son. My son, and not hers. My son, who I thought was dead.’
As she spoke Fran’s voice trembled with pain and anger. How could another woman have claimed Jack? Had she no pity, no compassion, no understanding of how she, Jack’s real mother, might be feeling, believing that her child was dead? But underneath her anger Fran was battling not to listen to the critical inner voice telling her that she had never been a proper mother to Jack and that she had let him down. This was a voice she didn’t want to hear.
‘Jack’s mine. He belongs with me. With us, Marcus,’ she insisted.
Marcus squeezed her hand, but did not make any response.
Emily hadn’t been surprised when Francine had rung to say that she would like to talk to her. She’d been expecting her to make contact, and, of course, dreading it. Emily knew in her bones that Tommy’s auntie would want to make a c
laim on her nephew. Emily had seen it in her eyes when they had met in the lane. Emily had no proper legal right to Tommy, not really, even if she did have those false papers she had managed to get when she had first taken him in, claiming that he was the son of her dead cousin. They wouldn’t stand up in a court of law if things were to get nasty. Emily’s stomach was twisting itself into painful knots. She hadn’t said anything to Tommy about her fears. The poor lad was upset and worried enough.
‘Your auntie wants to come and see me,’ she had told him after the phone call, and immediately he had got all upset.
‘She can’t take me away. I won’t go with her,’ he insisted in a panic.
‘No one’s going to take you away from me, Tommy, unless you want them to,’ Emily had tried to reassure him, forced to acknowledge deep inside herself that whilst Tommy was saying now that he wanted to be with her, he might change his mind. His auntie was his own blood, after all, even if she, Emily, hated having to acknowledge that fact.
Determined to put him first and do her best for him, she had told him, ‘Listen, I’m going to make you a promise now and then I want you to make me one, all right?’
He had nodded and waited.
‘I promise you that whatever you want to do, whoever you want to be with, I will make sure that you can. Whatever you want to do, Tommy, do you understand? And in return I want you to promise me that you will tell me honestly what it is that you want. Not now…not just yet…but you’ll know when the time is right. Promise?’
When he flung himself into her arms and replied gruffly, ‘Promise,’ Emily had held him tightly. Parting with him would break her heart, but far better that her heart was broken than his.
However, she certainly wasn’t going to have his auntie crying all over him and making him feel bad, so she’d sent him out of the house with Wilhelm and the dog – for his own sake – whilst she heard what his auntie had to say.
‘This is the house.’
Francine looked at the pretty Georgian building, and then took a deep breath. Jack was her son. Twice now she’d allowed others to overrule her and to take him from her. Well, she wasn’t going to let it happen a third time.
Francine looked round the warm comfortable kitchen, a proper family kitchen, her critical inner voice pointed out, not like the cold clinical kitchen of Vi’s house.
She looked at Marcus. She was so thankful that he was here with her and that this hadn’t happened whilst he had been away on duty. He was holding her hand firmly in his own, his presence helping her to stay calm.
Emily had intended to take them into the front room after she had let them in, and he, Tommy’s auntie’s husband, had introduced them both, but then she had told herself that she had nothing to hide from Tommy’s auntie and that she certainly wasn’t going to put on airs and graces for her.
Tommy had told her already that he didn’t know the man who’d been with his auntie, so Emily guessed that they couldn’t have been married that long.
‘I’ve sent Tommy out whilst we have our discussion,’ Emily told Francine, lifting her chin determinedly. ‘Proper upset, he’s been, begging me not to let you take him back to those parents of his who don’t seem to have cared tuppence about him, from what he’s told me.’
Francine looked at Marcus. They’d discussed the necessity for her to reveal her real relationship with Jack, and that it was his mother that was claiming him and not merely an aunt, but now that the moment had come to do so, Francine was uncomfortably aware of how her past would appear to another woman. Her heart was thudding into her chest. Emily’s blunt accusation made her feel so guilty.
‘There’s no question of Jack going back to live with Vi,’ she told Emily immediately. ‘He will be living with us in London, won’t he, Marcus?’ she appealed to her husband.
Emily wasn’t having that. ‘An auntie he barely knows and an uncle he doesn’t know at all? Where’s the sense in that? It’s bad enough that the poor lad was treated the way he was by his mum and dad. Begged me to promise him that he wouldn’t have to go back to them, he has. Not that they seem to care much about him. If they did then they’d be here, wouldn’t they?’ Emily demanded with irrefutable logic, which Francine could only contradict by bursting out, ‘The reason they aren’t here is because they aren’t really his parents.’
This wasn’t how she had intended their discussion to go, but it was important that this woman, who was behaving as though she had the maternal right to protect Jack, should know what the real situation was, Francine defended her outburst to herself. She looked silently at Marcus for his support.
He gave it promptly. ‘What my wife has said is the truth. The Firths are not Jack’s real mother and father, even though they brought him up as their son.’
‘Then whose son is he?’ Emily demanded, even though she had already begun to suspect the truth. No mere auntie would behave as the woman in front of her was doing.
‘He’s mine,’ Francine answered. ‘Jack is my son, although of course he doesn’t know it.’
Emily was trying desperately not to let the couple see how afraid what she had just learned made her feel.
‘A mother who turned her back on him and let him be treated badly,’ she couldn’t stop herself from accusing Francine.
Immediately Marcus leaped to Francine’s defence, saying firmly, ‘My wife didn’t know—’
But Francine stopped him, shaking her head and telling him determinedly, ‘No, Marcus, let me explain. She’s got a right to know the truth, and so, when he’s ready to hear it, will Jack.’
Lifting her head Francine looked Emily in the eye and told her unsteadily, ‘I was only a girl when Jack was born. A girl without a husband who’d got herself into trouble. My mother was ill. There was no one for me to turn to except my sister Vi. When she begged me to let her and her husband adopt Jack, saying that they’d love him and look after him, I agreed because I thought I was doing the best thing for him.’
She mustn’t allow herself to feel sympathy, Emily determined, ignoring the tears shining in Francine’s eyes.
‘You thought but you didn’t bother to find out, did you?’ she demanded briskly. ‘You didn’t care enough to see that your sister and her husband were making him unhappy and treating him badly, poor little lad. Scared to death of your sister’s husband, he was, and always being sent to bed supperless and made to feel he wasn’t wanted, from what he’s told me.’
‘Do you think I’d have let that happen if I’d known?’ Francine demanded, white-faced. ‘Vi made me promise not to have any contact with him. She said it was for his sake. I thought that Vi would love him. I went to work in America. Vi encouraged me to go.’
Marcus put his arm round her to comfort her.
This was awful, Fran thought. So much worse than she had anticipated it was going to be. This woman was behaving as though she had deliberately abandoned Jack, and that wasn’t true.
‘I missed him dreadfully. I thought about him every day, imagining him growing up. I wanted to be with him. It was only when I came back that I found out what was going on. Vi had had Jack evacuated, even though Jean, my other sister, had tried to persuade her not to.’
Francine paused to take a deep breath and steady her voice. ‘When he ran away and turned up at Jean’s, too afraid to go home, I thought it must have been meant to be. I wanted to tell him then – I wanted to – but Jean said that I shouldn’t, that it wouldn’t be fair to him, and then Vi started creating and I knew that if I tried to do anything it would only make things worse for Jack, so I had to let him go…again.’ She had to turn into the loving protection of Marcus’s arm as the memory of that awful time came flooding back to her.
When she had herself back under control she turned to look at Emily again. The other woman hadn’t moved. Her face, set and bleached of colour, was devoid of any expression, but Francine knew how Emily would be judging her, and finding her wanting.
‘I couldn’t bear it. I wanted to be with him so much. I
tried to see him. I drove out to the farm where he’d been evacuated to, but it had been hit by a bomb. There was nothing left of it…and I thought…that is, everyone said…that Jack would have been killed along with the farmer and his wife.’
Emily said nothing. The truth was that she dare not speak. The story Francine had told her would surely tear at the coldest stoniest heart, and her heart was far from that. Just because she felt sorry for the woman that did not mean that she should give Tommy up to her, Emily told herself. It was what Tommy himself wanted that mattered, not anyone else.
‘I don’t know how my Jack came to be with you, but you must have realised that he had a family,’ she accused Emily.
‘What I realised was that he was like a little starving animal, creeping out of the shadows behind the Royal Court Theatre to live off scraps of food,’ Emily told her, her sympathy for Tommy’s mother vanishing as she remembered the poor little boy’s plight. ‘Couldn’t even speak then – not so much as a word, and so thin that…It took me a good while to coax him round, and with my late husband’s favourite salmon sandwiches as well. Con would have had a fit if he’d known. Well, he did have a fit when I told him that Tommy was coming to live with us, but I soon told him what was what.’
‘Con?’ Francine demanded, white-faced.
Emily looked at her, and suddenly realised why her face had seemed so familiar.
The two women stared at one another, the silence in the kitchen broken only when Emily gave a small sigh.
‘I remember you now,’ she told Francine. She did remember her, a very pretty, very young girl working at the theatre, one of Con’s girls. Tension replaced the earlier silence. Emily took a deep breath, putting two and two together. ‘So it was Con who got you into trouble, was it?’
Con, Tommy’s father. The thought gave her quite a turn, and oddly, made it seem all the more right and proper in a way that Tommy should have found his way to her, Emily thought.