‘Seven rooms in my house in Brookfield,’ Evelyn Reeder went on. ‘Seven rooms and a separate apartment for the servants. The kindergarten want to board homeless children in my house and it will be taken from me by the law.’
‘Requisitioned,’ said Bernard. ‘Yes, but they can’t throw you out in the street. If there’s a separate flat in the house they’ll insist you move into it while they take over the rest of the place.’
‘Then I will have children beneath me, noisy children.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ said Bernard.
‘I thought the kindergarten people would find me a post in a hospital but they say that is not their department. I must find my own post. I will put the furniture into store, if I am allowed to do that?’
‘Are we not gettin’ a wee bit ahead of ourselves?’ Bernard said. ‘I imagine I can find you somewhere to stay but—’
‘With no children?’
‘With no children,’ Bernard said, ‘but I’m not sure I can find you a job.’
‘It is not your department?’ the woman said, scornfully. ‘I have been hearing that from the day I placed myself on the labour market.’
She wore high-heeled shoes in black patent leather. Without straining, Bernard could see one shoe bobbing up and down on the end of a shapely foot.
She was angry and frustrated and he guessed she’d been led a merry dance by officials far and wide. She was a woman alone, at the mercy of authorities who wanted nothing to do with her. She would probably have received more sympathy, more courtesy, if she’d been totally destitute.
He watched the shoe tap up and down.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘What I require from you, Mrs Reeder, are copies of your birth certificate and marriage lines and any documents relating to your qualifications as a medical practitioner. Did you ever work in a hospital, for instance?’
‘I trained in medical wards in Bruges and Amsterdam.’
‘Are you a surgeon like your husband?’
‘There are no females in surgery. I am a physician.’
‘Would you be prepared to work in a hospital again?’
‘I will not clean floors and lavatories.’
‘Good God! Is that what they’ve been offering you?’
The woman said nothing. She lifted her head, tilted her chin and stared at the little fanlight above Bernard’s head.
Bernard had never seen so much pride in anyone before. There was no evidence of conceit, no vanity, no indication that she was posing. He had to think faster than he had been obliged to do in a very long time. With this woman there could be no backtracking, no compromises, no brush-off. He must ensure that the autocratic Jewish lady got everything she was entitled to and perhaps a little bit more to compensate for the raw deal she’d been handed so far.
But he did not dare make promises he couldn’t keep.
‘Give me three days,’ he said.
‘To do what?’ she said. ‘To find another way to be rid of me?’
‘To find you a suitable job, Doctor Reeder,’ Bernard said.
‘And a suitable place to stay?’
‘Yes,’ Bernard promised her. ‘And a place of your own to stay.’
8
It would have been better for all concerned if Jackie hadn’t come home on leave. It would certainly have been easier on Babs if her husband’s arrival at Euston hadn’t coincided with publication of the 9th December issue of Brockway’s Illustrated Weekly.
By the time he reached London on the overnight train from Devon and fought his way across the city in full webbing and lugging a kitbag, Jackie was not in the best of humours. It didn’t matter to him that incendiary bombs had pasted London and that large sections of the city were closed off. He had only one thought in mind – to get home to Glasgow, his family and Babs as soon as possible. Euston was chaotic. Air raids had shot his travel plan to hell and he found himself with three hours to kill before anything vaguely resembling a train would be heading out for Glasgow. To while away the time he bought ten Woodbine, a Daily Mirror and the latest issue of Brockway’s.
Like most servicemen, Jackie enjoyed the illustrated weekly’s mixed bag of commentary and news, and photographs in which refugees rubbed shoulders with pretty girls in bathing costumes. He scanned the Mirror first, though, for he was somewhat concerned about events in North Africa.
The RAOC mechanics had been working night and day to fit the battalion’s armoured vehicles for desert warfare and they’d all had extra jabs, had been issued with tropical kit, had drowsed through boring lectures on unsavoury foreign diseases and in ten days’ time would be bundled on to a troop ship, and sent out to service the hardware somewhere in the Western Desert.
Jackie had no curiosity about North Africa, no sense of excitement or fear of the great unknown. One sheep in the khaki flock, he did, more or less, what he was told. He had earned his stripe by being a good mechanic and was more concerned about the effects of excessive heat on the unreliable Nuffield Liberty engines of the new model Crusaders than he was about personal safety.
He scrounged a cup of tea and a bun from a Salvation Army stall and settled down among all the other soldiers, sailors and airmen who were in transit that morning. He was tired, dog-tired, but didn’t dare fall asleep in case he missed the announcement about the Glasgow train. He found a spot on the corner of a bench and with his kitbag tucked between his knees, lit a ciggie and flicked open Brockway’s at an article entitled ‘Women of the Clyde’, which was made up of thirteen large photographs, some captions and stirring text.
It didn’t look like the Clyde he remembered: women in shawls queuing outside a dairy, women in overalls and headbands huddled round a brazier on a bleak, black-and-white factory floor, a smiling young female riveter with her mask tipped back, four girls in a locker room changing their clothes and showing a lot of bare shoulder and thigh in the process.
Jackie sighed, leaned into the kitbag and turned the page.
And there was Babs, his lovely blonde wife and the mother of his children, posing like a tart in the middle of a cobbled street he didn’t even recognise. Her head was tossed back like a film star’s and her arms were stretched up as if she were dancing a reel and you could see her breasts pushing through her shirt – his shirt, come to think of it – and she was pouting in the same alluring manner she adopted when she wanted him to take her to bed.
Every randy male who bought the paper would be thinking the same thing he’d been thinking when he’d looked at the four girls in the locker room stepping out of their skirts and garter belts. Only this was no anonymous young thing: this was Barbara Conway Hallop, his bloody wife!
He tossed away the Woodbine.
He got to his feet.
He waved the illustrated rag in the air and shouted four or five words so obscene that they would have had him charged if an officer or an MP had been within earshot.
Then he sat down again.
Fingers shaking, he lit another cigarette.
And began, systematically, to read.
* * *
Thirteen hours and one pork pie later, Jackie arrived at the bungalow in Raines Drive and started kicking the locked front door.
‘What the heck is that?’ Christy said, sitting up in the armchair by the fire. ‘Are you expecting company?’
‘Not me,’ said Babs. ‘Not at this time of night.’
She put the whisky glass down on the coffee table and got to her feet. Christy was up before her, an arm out to protect her. He tugged at the blackout curtain and found himself staring into the face of a wild-eyed army corporal.
‘Bastard!’ the corporal shouted. ‘You bloody bastard!’
‘Dear God! It’s Jackie.’
‘Jackie?’ said Christy.
‘My husband.’
‘Did you – I mean, did you know he was due home?’
‘Course not,’ said Babs. ‘Would I be sittin’ here like this if I had?’
‘I reckon,’ Christy dropped the curtain
, ‘he’s cottoned on to my piece in Brockway’s.’
‘I told you he wouldn’t like it.’
‘What the hell are we gonna do now?’
Babs pulled in her stomach, thrust out her chest and tightened the belt of her dressing gown.
‘Let him in, of course,’ she said.
Three copies of Brockway’s had arrived in the morning mail and Christy, pleased with the spread, had shown Babs the photograph over breakfast. Because of the excitement, she’d been twenty minutes late for work but the moment she’d slid the paper on to his desk Archie had forgiven her. He’d peered at the picture through his thick lenses, then he’d taken off his glasses and stuck his nose down until it almost touched the page.
‘It is you, indeed,’ he’d said. ‘By Gum, don’t you look…’
‘What?’ Babs had said. ‘Don’t I look okay?’
‘Oh yes, okay isn’t the word for it.’
‘What is the word for it?’
‘Scrumptious.’
‘Scrumptious?’
‘You know what I mean,’ Archie had said, and blushed.
Polly and Bernard had both called to offer congratulations and at the lunch break Archie had trotted out to the newsagents on the corner and had bought four copies of the magazine and had had Babs sign them. All day long she had basked in the warm glow of celebrity, with Brockway’s, open at her photograph, propped on the desk. But she had known in her heart of hearts that sooner or later there would be a price to pay for her fleeting moment of fame.
As she went out of the lounge to open the front door, it crossed her mind that Jackie had deserted his army post and had come all the way to Glasgow just to punish her. When she opened the door she kept her knee behind it but so great was Jackie’s ire that he pitched the kitbag from his shoulder and followed it, shouting, into the hall.
Babs staggered back. He had a knife, a long knife, raised above his head. She covered her face with her forearms, shrieking, ‘No, Jackie, no, no!’
He brought the knife down and stabbed her shoulder with it. She felt the blade stiffen then crumple, then he was swatting her about the head and she realised it wasn’t a knife at all but the tattered remnants of Brockway’s Illustrated Weekly rolled up like a baton.
Jackie clouted her about the ears.
She squealed.
He clouted her again and would have gone on clouting her if Christy hadn’t intervened. He caught Jackie’s arm, snared the straps of Jackie’s webbing, spun him into the kitchen and slammed him against the cooker.
Babs heard pans rattling and the bizarre sounds the men made as they fought, panting and grunting and odd little orgasmic gasps. She kicked the front door shut, switched on the hall and kitchen lights, stormed into the kitchen and shouted, ‘STOP IT, THE PAIR OF YOU.’
Rather to her surprise, they did.
‘What the heck’s wrong with you, man?’ Christy gasped.
‘Me?’ Jackie panted. ‘You’re screwin’ ma wife an’ you’re askin’ what’s wrong with me?’ He sank back against the rim of the cooker, the furled copy of Brockway’s hanging limply from his fist. ‘Who the bloody hell are you, anyway? Are you the lodger?’
‘Sure, I’m the lodger.’
‘I thought you were older. She said you were older.’
‘Well, I’m not older,’ said Christy, ‘though what the hell that has to do with anything—’
‘You took these?’ Jackie wagged the magazine.
‘Yeah, I did.’
‘What else did you take?’
‘Pardon?’
‘What else, what others, the ones they wouldn’t print.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, man!’ said Christy. ‘It’s one lousy photograph.’
‘Lousy?’ Babs murmured, frowning.
Her cheeks were the shade of blanched tomatoes and her left ear stung. Her hair was all over the place. Her lipstick was smeared across her chin. She looked a right unholy mess, not at all what a wife was supposed to look like when her brave solider husband returned home.
Tears welled up in her eyes. But she was too angry to cry, too angry at Jackie’s assumption that she’d encouraged Christy to expose her in a national magazine, that she was so vain that she would pose nude for the man, let alone go to bed with him.
The fact that she had contemplated going to bed with Christy, that she had – and maybe still did – fancy him was irrelevant. She was angry with Jackie for being angry with her, for being jealous of a man he had never met and, most of all, for cuffing her around the ears as if she was some naughty wee schoolgirl. But rough old tenement habits died hard, she supposed, and under the circumstances this was the only way Jackie could express his feelings.
She experienced a wave of regret at the thought that she had betrayed not her husband but her aspirations by taking a stranger into her home, for Jackie didn’t really look like Jackie any more. The scraped-bone flakiness had gone, and with a trim haircut and a weathered tan he looked like just the sort of guy she might have fallen for if she hadn’t already been his wife.
She sucked back tears and bit her lip. ‘Lousy?’ she said again. ‘It isn’t lousy; it’s lovely.’
‘You look like a bloody tart.’
‘Well, I’m not a tart – or maybe I am. Maybe that’s what you always liked about me, Jackie. What are you doing here anyway?’
‘Leave.’
‘How long?’
‘Ten days.’
‘Then?’
‘Embarkation. The desert, most like,’ said Jackie.
‘Hey, I’m sorry,’ Christy said.
‘For what?’ said Jackie.
He untangled himself from the taps of the cooker, wrestling with webbing and the weight of his greatcoat. His cap had fallen off and his hair, Babs noticed, had a sprinkling of grey in it. Same old Hallop ears, though, sticking out like handles on a milk jug.
‘Listen,’ Christy said, ‘I took the shot when Babs wasn’t expecting it. She didn’t realise I intended to have it published. She didn’t even know I was a photographer. I guess you’ve every right to be mad about the photograph but whatever else you’re thinking – well, it hasn’t happened and it never will.’
‘Sod it!’ said Jackie, hoarsely. ‘Right now I’m too knackered to care. Where are the kids?’
‘April’s asleep next door. The rest are still out at Blackstone.’
‘Aw yeah,’ Jackie said. ‘Well, tomorrow I’ll go get them back.’
* * *
Since the night of the air raid Polly had continued to sleep in the larder.
She found the little cubby more comforting than claustrophobic. She had a lamp, a card table and a chair, a flask of hot tea, a wireless and three or four books on the shelf above the cot. The space, still smelling faintly of coffee beans and cheese, was more than adequate for her needs. She preferred it to the gloomy wasteland of the master bedroom and the double bed she had shared with Dominic. Snug in the cot, covered with blankets and a feather quilt, she could read, listen to the wireless or simply drowse and dream in peace and quiet.
Room by room, piece by piece, she had gradually deserted the parts of the house she had once shared with Dominic and the children.
The front parlour, with its broken window and bomb scars, was all but sealed off; the dining room too. Even the airy little breakfast room with its French doors overlooking the garden seemed too open and exposed for Polly these days. She made do with the lavatory under the stairs, washed in the kitchen and climbed up to the bathroom and bedrooms only when it became necessary to bathe, fish out clean clothes or refill her handbag with perfume, lipstick and make-up.
She preferred the basement kitchen and her burrow down in the roots of the mansion, and if she had been less self-centred and hermetical she might even have surrendered to the demands of the local billeting officers and handed the place over to the homeless.
Fin, of course, would have none of it. He needed comfort, space, gloom, the luxury of the big cold master bedroom and a
double bed for his Saturday night performance. But as Fin became ever more inventive in giving and taking sexual pleasure, Polly found herself longing not for Dom or Tony but only for peace and privacy and the solitude of her cubbyhole downstairs.
She wasn’t asleep when the doorbell rang.
If she had been asleep it’s doubtful if she would have heard anything short of a thousand-pounder exploding in the garden.
She no longer needed quantities of gin to push her into unconsciousness. She fell asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow, cradled in the knowledge that now she had fallen in love again she would waken to a nice, shiny-bright new day filled with all sorts of promises and possibilities.
The doorbell continued to ring.
She slid out of the cot, threw an overcoat over her pyjamas, glanced at the clock on the card table and gave a little tsk of annoyance at the lateness of the hour. Convinced that it would be some officious Civil Defence officer come to tell her that light was leaking from her window – which it wasn’t, of course – she followed the shaded beam of her pocket torch upstairs into the hall.
‘Who is it?’
‘Me.’
She didn’t have to ask who ‘me’ might be. He had been on her mind all evening long, all day in fact, and it seemed to her then that wishing had conjured him up out of the dank December air. She unbolted the door and opened it.
Christy had a bag with him, a canvas holdall slung over his shoulder. He gave a little shrug of apology and said, ‘You wouldn’t happen to have a spare bed lying empty, by any chance?’
‘Several.’ Polly closed and bolted the door behind him. ‘Did Babs throw you out or did you just tire of her jolly patter and jump ship?’
‘Jackie turned up unexpectedly.’
‘What?’
‘Embarkation leave. No warning.’
‘Did he— I mean, you and Babs weren’t…?’
‘Nope, but we might as well have been.’
‘Presumably Jackie saw the Brockway’s photograph?’
‘Sure did.’
‘And threw you out?’
‘I threw myself out. I mean, hell, the guy’s heading for the Western Desert in ten days’ time. It’s his house, after all.’
Wives at War Page 15