Wives at War

by Jessica Stirling

  All the floating prejudices, all the overt slanders that applied to the tribe of Israel came popping into Babs’s head and she experienced a little shiver of revulsion and at precisely the same moment a little shiver of revulsion at her revulsion, a confusing amalgam of guilt and distaste that almost caused her to drop the tea tray into Mrs Reeder’s lap.

  Spotting Babs’s alarm, and deducing the reason for it, Archie hastened to an introduction: ‘Mrs Reeder, my assistant Mrs Hallop.’

  The woman turned her head. She had a long neck and a strong chin and – how could Babs ignore it? – a fine, hooked, hawklike nose that set off her heavy-lidded, jet-black eyes to perfection. She looked, Babs thought, like an oil painting, so luxurious, rich and opulent that at first you were daunted, then you were fascinated. She could only imagine the effect that Mrs Reeder might have on men but you didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce the effect she would have on the little tin gods of industrial middle management.

  Babs put down the tray and offered the lady her hand.

  ‘Who are you?’ the woman said. ‘What can you do for me?’

  She had only the faintest trace of an accent and sounded not so much angry as supercilious.

  Babs felt herself bristle. She stepped back and busied herself pouring tea. Tea, tea, tea: the answer to every problem. Mrs Reeder didn’t want tea. Mrs Reeder wanted work yet she, Babs Hallop, was doing the usual thing, dishing out the brown stuff like a hollow character in a radio play. ‘Milk, Mrs Reeder? Sugar, Mrs Reeder?’

  ‘I have no time for your tea,’ Mrs Reeder said. ‘I have to find a job.’

  ‘It isn’t money, is it?’ said Archie in a soft wheedling tone.

  ‘No, it is the – the priority.’

  ‘Necessity,’ said Archie, even more softly.

  Oh God, Babs thought, don’t let him start on English lessons, not now, not with this woman. If he starts on English lessons she’ll brain him with the tea tray, and if she doesn’t, I will.

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Reeder agreed. ‘A necessity.’

  ‘How large is your family in Liège?’ Archie asked.

  ‘Mother and Father are there. I have a sister and her husband in Amsterdam and two brothers, doctors like me, in Brussels.’

  ‘Have you heard from them since the Germans occupied the country?’

  ‘No.’

  Archie nodded. ‘So you’re entirely on your own, Mrs Reeder?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Polly, it was Polly all over, except that Mrs Reeder’s husband was dead, not merely absent. Babs had a vision of the woman wandering about some gaunt mansion in one of the high-class villages that hid themselves among the trees of rural Renfrewshire. She saw a shadow of Polly in the Belgian widow: alone, and alienated by her own cleverness. But Polly still had Mammy and Bernard to fall back on and this woman’s family was lost to her. She had nothing, nothing but style, money and her skills to protect her from the ravages of petty bureaucracy.

  ‘Your husband’s family?’ Babs asked.

  ‘A brother in Worthing.’

  ‘Won’t he take you in?’

  ‘I do not want to be taken in,’ the woman snapped. ‘I do not want to be taken care of. I need to find a useful job to do here. I need to find a position of my own. Why will nobody believe me? Is it so hard to understand?’

  Archie edged the teacup towards her and made a little gesture of encouragement. The woman lifted the cup and drank. Babs, still standing, offered her a cigarette. Archie lit up for all of them and for a minute or more they smoked in uncompanionable silence.

  ‘There’s always voluntary work,’ Archie suggested. ‘The voluntary organisations are always on the lookout for extra—’

  ‘No, I must be paid.’

  ‘Why?’ said Babs.

  ‘Because then I will have worth.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Babs. ‘Of course. Sorry.’

  Archie sat back, pushed his spectacles into place and frowned.

  ‘We need,’ he said at length, ‘to pull a few strings.’

  ‘What strings?’ Mrs Reeder said. ‘I have tried to pull strings. You are going to tell me you will do something and send me to another department meanwhile. Then you will do nothing. You will pass me like a buck and be rid of the nuisance.’

  ‘Oh no, ma’am,’ said Archie. ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree if you think we’re going to let you go. In this office we take our responsibilities seriously. Are you with me on that, Mrs Hallop?’

  ‘Absolutely, Mr Harding,’ Babs agreed.

  ‘Now who do we know who can help us out of a jam?’

  ‘Bernard,’ said Babs, surprised at her own acuity.

  ‘Bernard?’ said Archie.

  ‘My stepfather,’ Babs said. ‘He’s employed by Breslin Council and they have lots of – of – ladies in that part of the world.’

  ‘Ladies?’ Archie tapped his glasses. ‘Oh yes, of course, lots of vacancies for – ladies. Did I hear a rumour that they’re opening a new military hospital out that way?’

  ‘You did,’ Babs said. ‘I’ll give Bernard a tinkle right now, shall I?’

  ‘Please do,’ said Archie.

  * * *

  It struck Polly as odd that Dougie and Christy had so much in common. Dougie had travelled not at all – one or two trips down the Clyde in a paddle steamer was the extent of his journeying – while Christy and his camera had chased all over the globe. But if Christy had experienced at first-hand many of the crises of the past half-dozen years the well-read, stay-at-home Glaswegian seemed better able to put those crises in perspective.

  Polly helped Miss Dawlish clear away the dishes. The housekeeper had done them proud: rollmop herring, lamb casserole, and mock banana cream pie to finish with. The men drank bottled beer. Angus, on his best behaviour, drank Vimto and, afterwards, ‘smoked’ the chocolate cigar that Polly had brought him.

  Polly listened in desultory fashion to the ebb and flow of conversation. With a big lunch sitting comfortably inside her, she contented herself by watching her energetic little nephew nibble his chocolate cigar. He looked, she thought, more Conway than Hallop, and speculated on the perversity of genes that shaped character and appearance, and wondered how the son of a skinny, unattractive Gorbals guttersnipe could show every sign of turning into a handsome young man.

  She hoped that Angus had inherited nothing from her side of the family.

  She had met her absent father for the first time only a month or two before he disappeared again, and had been anything but impressed. He was short in stature, huge in ego, and with a nasty streak that bordered on wickedness. Polly wasn’t sorry that he had vanished into thin air once more.

  Few traces of Conway virtues or, fortunately, Conway vices were evident in her children. With the best will in the world, she had never been able to regard Stuart and Ishbel as other than capricious. What she didn’t dare examine, though, was the confluence of genes in her own character for she suspected that she might be more like Frank, her sly and greedy father, than Lizzie, her tender-hearted, hard-working mother.

  That calm Thursday afternoon in the farmhouse kitchen at Blackstone, seated on the sofa with her legs tucked under her and her nephew lolling at her feet like a sleepy puppy, Polly didn’t feel greedy. If anything, she felt a soothing, almost paralysing sense of being at the mercy of events she could not control, as if something had not so much snapped as loosened within her and she was drifting towards a massive and imperious change.

  She knew what the feeling was, of course, what it meant.

  She was in process of falling in love.

  She turned her head: he was seated at the kitchen table, a glass of whisky in hand, his blunt, boyish features outlined against the light from the window, a cigarette bobbing in his mouth. He had a pretty mouth, almost too feminine for the shape of his face. His hair was untidy and a row of Romanesque curls clung to his brow. She wondered what it would be like to feel those soft springy curls against her skin, if they would be
coarser than they appeared to be and if the hair on his wrists and forearms extended to his chest and belly.

  Christy was unaware of her scrutiny.

  He leaned an elbow on the table and listened to Dougie sound off about the campaign in North Africa.

  ‘Well,’ Dougie was saying, ‘I know what the newspapers are sayin’. It’s the right season o’ the year for desert fightin’, an’ here’s General Wavell dug in an’ doin’ nothin’ while the Eyeties consolidate their supply lines an’ get on wi’ buildin’ this wonderful new road they’ve started. Far as I can make out, though, Wavell’s right to hold the line round the Nile an’ the Suez Canal. He’s got four divisions, sixty thousand men, an’ not much more armour than a few dozen heavy tanks. When the race across the Nile starts our heavy tanks will be no bloody use at all. Have you got pals in the desert?’

  ‘Pals?’ Christy said.

  ‘Colleagues, photographers?’

  ‘Sure,’ Christy said. ‘All the news agencies want to put men in the field.’

  ‘Why don’t they?’

  Polly was listening now.

  Angus rolled against the cushions, the chocolate object, steadily melting, clenched in his teeth. He scowled at Dougie. How much the boy understood, how much Dougie had explained to him, Polly couldn’t be certain, nor was she convinced that it was entirely healthy for a nine-year-old to be introduced to the details of combat. There was no way to avoid or prevent it, she supposed, boys being what they were.

  ‘It’s expensive for one thing,’ Christy said. ‘The photo mags have generated a demand for high-quality images published with speed. The public wants and expects the stuff to be up to the minute. But this war isn’t like the last war. You can’t just dispatch a guy to the Western Front with a tripod camera. We’re – you’re fighting all over the globe so the news agencies have to pool their resources. Anyhow, the military authorities insist on it.’

  ‘Control what you get to see?’

  ‘Try to,’ said Christy. ‘Official military photographers rule the roost but a few civilian photographers are given a permit, an accredited identification card that allows them to shoot classified subjects.’

  ‘Up on the front line, y’ mean?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘An’ you haven’t got a card yet?’

  ‘Nope, not yet.’

  ‘Is that why you’re not in Cairo or Benghazi?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be in Africa anyway. I’m on another assignment.’

  ‘To sail with a North Atlantic convoy?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘My Uncle Dennis is on a carrier,’ Angus chimed in. ‘He sends me postcards. He fixes the aeroplanes. Maybe you’ll meet him, Mr Cameron.’

  Christy glanced at the boy and then, smiling, at Polly. ‘Maybe I will, Angus,’ he said.

  Angus, it seemed, had been patiently awaiting his chance. He got up, pushed the remains of the cigar into his mouth, and said through a mouthful of chocolate. ‘You promised to take a photo of Ron.’

  ‘Yeah, I did, didn’t I?’ Christy said.

  ‘Don’t be impertinent, young man,’ said Miss Dawlish. ‘Douglas and Mr Cameron have better things to do than humour your whims.’

  ‘He promised. He spat on my hand.’

  North Africa and the battles of the Atlantic were forgotten. Miss Dawlish advanced from the region of the sink. She moved, Polly thought, with all the grace of a small tank, one hand out to snare Angus by the ear.

  Angus darted away and hid behind Christy’s chair.

  ‘He promised, he promised.’

  ‘Sure did,’ said Christy and, finishing off his whisky, gathered the boy to him and got to his feet. ‘Let’s do it now, while there’s still some decent light.’

  ‘Angus!’ said Miss Dawlish, hands on hips. ‘Behave yourself or you’ll be for it when our visitor goes away.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Dawlish.’ Angus snapped off a salute that would have done General Wavell proud, then, taking Christy’s hand, dragged the man towards the kitchen door.

  ‘Hang on, son,’ Christy said. ‘Let me get my camera.’ He nodded to Polly, who had already begun to unfold herself from the sofa. ‘You coming too, Mrs Manone? It’s not every day you get a chance to see a pig being shot.’

  ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ Polly said, and went out into the hallway to fetch her hat and coat.

  * * *

  Space in the council building was at a premium and Bernard was obliged to share a ground-floor room with three other officers.

  Protected by an apron of grass, the broad sandstone edifice stood off the Bearsden-Breslin highway. It had been erected in 1901 with money raised by the sale of common ground to a consortium of businessmen who had hoped to expand the thready transport system and carry the city out into the countryside. The scheme had come to naught in the end but Breslin had acquired a railway branch line and a fine new civic centre by that time, and suffered no financial loss when the speculators’ grandiose plans went awry.

  Intrigued by local history, Bernard had pored over the archives and was now generally regarded as an authority on who currently owned what. Bungalow, villa or cottage, mansion house or mud hut, Bernard had them all marked down in his little black book, for persuasion was Bernard’s game and, not to put too fine a point on it, blackmail where blackmail was necessary to further his selfless ends.

  In his day Bernard had been by turns a brave soldier, an efficient rent collector, an effective estate agent in one of Dominic Manone’s front companies, but only when war rolled round again and he was appointed billeting officer for Breslin District Council did he finally come into his own. Within the empire of agents, officers, lawyers, surveyors and councillors who inhabited the sandstone building above the highway, Bernard stood out like a colossus.

  True, he didn’t look much like a colossus, though he no longer had the haggard, hangdog appearance of a rent collector or the nervy twitchiness of an estate agent whose income depended on commissions. He was confident now and fulfilled. It showed in plump jowls and an expanded waistline for, rationing or no rationing, Bernard had developed a bow window that made it increasingly difficult for him to button up his trousers.

  He had been surprised but not displeased when Babs had telephoned him. He had done little enough for the girls since Rosie had married Kenny MacGregor and moved into a flat in Cowcaddens, and he had been too busy to pay more than passing attention to what was happening south of the river.

  The Hallop kids – his step-grandchildren – were boarded at Blackstone only four or five miles from the council offices, but he’d seen little of them this past year for the billeting arrangement had been none of his doing and he was not officially responsible for checking on their welfare.

  Besides, Blackstone was still too closely associated with Dominic Manone for Bernard’s liking. It had taken all his strength of character to shake free of Dominic’s shady influence. Having done so, he regarded himself as a man of integrity, absolutely incorruptible, and he was convinced that no one would ever again tempt him to stray from the straight and narrow.

  ‘You are Peabody, Bernard Peabody?’ Evelyn Reeder enquired.

  ‘Indeed, ma’am. Indeed I am.’

  ‘If you find me work to which I am suited you will also be required to find me lodgings.’ No beating about the bush for Mrs Reeder, apparently. ‘It is too far to travel from where I live and I am unfamiliar with this part of the country.’

  ‘Where do you live, Mrs Reeder?’ Bernard asked.

  ‘Brookfield.’

  ‘Ah yes, deep in the wilds of Renfrewshire; a long way.’

  ‘You see how far I have had to travel to keep this appointment?’

  ‘I do,’ said Bernard. ‘How well do you know my daughter?’

  ‘Your daughter?’

  ‘Stepdaughter, actually,’ Bernard said. ‘Babs.’

  ‘Is she the person in the Recruitment Centre?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I met her this mornin
g for the first and only time.’

  ‘Really!’ said Bernard.

  ‘Why do you sound surprised?’

  ‘Surprised? Do I? Well, I was rather under the impression that Babs was a friend of yours.’

  ‘We are not friends,’ the woman said. ‘I do not know her.’

  Obviously you don’t, Bernard thought, or you wouldn’t be asking why I’m surprised. There was nothing altruistic about Lizzie’s middle daughter and he wondered why Babs had gone out of her way to do this woman a favour, particularly as Evelyn Reeder was Jewish and Babs had more than her fair share of prejudice against – what was the current phrase? – ‘Jews and Catholics and bald-headed men’. The department in which Babs worked was probably under as much pressure as Breslin’s own employment services, however, and his stepdaughter had simply been trying to impress her boss by shipping the troublesome Mrs Reeder out of the county.

  ‘I believe you’re a doctor?’ Bernard said.

  ‘My husband was Gordon Reeder, the surgeon.’

  ‘I take it your husband is – ah, deceased?’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘Didn’t he have colleagues who can find you a suitable post?’

  ‘My husband had more enemies than friends in the profession.’

  ‘It’s honest of you to admit it,’ Bernard said. ‘I take it we’re up against some sort of prejudice here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Prejudice against you because you aren’t British, because you’re female, or because…’

  ‘Because I’m a Jew?’

  ‘Precisely,’ Bernard said.

  One table, two chairs, a coat-rack and a great teetering stack of cardboard boxes filled the little room, which was so cramped that Mrs Reeder almost seemed to be sitting on his lap. He shifted his weight from one buttock to the other and sucked in his stomach to give the woman a little more room. She angled her body to one side and crossed her long legs. She reminded him just a little of Polly, though she was ten or a dozen years older than Polly and much taller. She wore black stockings under a loose black skirt, an expensive black overcoat, and a blouse in pale grey silk: proper widow’s weeds, Bernard thought approvingly, and frowned.