Wives at War

by Jessica Stirling

  ‘With a boy like that,’ said Archie, ruefully, ‘you don’t need a dog.’

  ‘You’re lucky he didn’t bite you,’ Babs said. ‘Are those supposed to be shorts?’

  Archie glanced down as if the garment in question had attached itself to him without his knowledge.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘From my days as a Boy Scout.’

  ‘They’re the longest shorts I’ve ever seen,’ said Babs.

  ‘I was taller in those days,’ said Archie.

  ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘Just passing by.’

  ‘You came especially to see me, didn’t you?’

  ‘Emphatically not,’ said Archie. ‘Hoy, you.’

  ‘Me?’ Angus mouthed, dabbing a finger to his chest.

  ‘Yes, you with the hair – is that a pig I see over there?’

  ‘What if it— Yes,’ Angus said, remembering his manners. ‘It’s a pig. It’s mine. I mean, I look after him.’

  ‘Do you, indeed?’ said Archie. ‘Well, I just hope you haven’t given him some daft name like Sydney or – let me see – like Ron.’

  Angus’s mouth popped open. ‘How did you—’ One eye screwed up with suspicion. ‘Mum told you, didn’t she?’

  ‘If you think, young man, that your mother and I squander valuable man-hours discussing livestock then you’re not as intelligent as you appear to be.’

  ‘Pardon?’ said Angus.

  ‘Mr Harding,’ Babs said, ‘this is my son.’

  ‘Ron?’

  ‘Angus,’ Angus shouted.

  ‘Really!’ said Archie. ‘You look more like a Ron to me.’

  ‘Oh, stop it,’ said Babs softly. ‘He’s only a wee lad.’

  ‘No, he’s not,’ said Archie. ‘He’s a big lad.’

  ‘Now you’re here,’ Babs said, ‘just passing, perhaps you’d better come and meet the rest of my children.’

  ‘How many constitutes the rest?’

  ‘Three girls,’ said Babs. ‘I’ve never asked you this before, Archie; do you like children?’

  ‘I’m a teacher,’ said Archie. ‘Of course I don’t like children.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘I much prefer pigs,’ said Archie, loudly. ‘However, since I seem to have strayed into what amounts to a zoo, I suppose I might as well pretend to be nice in the hope that you’ll offer me a cup of milk or a dish of tea. You.’ He pointed at Angus and swung a leg from the saddle. ‘Fetch your sisters from yonder field and tell them not to bring me buttercups. I hate buttercups. Remember that for future reference. Mr Harding hates buttercups.’

  ‘Mum?’ said Angus.

  ‘After which,’ Archie went on, relentlessly, ‘you may take my steed – you may even ride my steed – to the stable, give him a good rub down with an oily rag and a bag of hay. Got that?’

  ‘Yee-ees.’

  ‘I take it you can ride a bicycle?’

  ‘Yee-ees.’

  ‘Then ride this one.’ Archie lifted the boneshaker by the crossbar and hoisted it over the gate. ‘Come on, lad, take it before I change my mind.’

  Angus glanced at Babs, who nodded assent, then, still slightly stunned by Mr Harding’s gab, grasped the bicycle by the handle-bars, wheeled it experimentally on to the grass behind the stable-barn, eased himself up on to the saddle and wobbled away into the field to fetch his sisters.

  Babs and Archie watched the boy find balance and pedal off.

  Archie said, ‘You don’t mind me dropping in like this, do you?’

  ‘Course not,’ said Babs. ‘Now you’re here I suppose you’d better come and be introduced to the rest of the family.’

  ‘In these shorts?’

  ‘Better with,’ said Babs, ‘than without.’

  Then, taking him by the arm, she led him towards the farmhouse door.

  * * *

  It was, Kenny realised, the first time that Rosie and he had walked out together since the war began. It felt very odd to be strolling beside his wife along Great Western Road on a fine mild Sunday afternoon, even odder to be pushing a go-chair with a toddler strapped into it.

  They were heading in the general direction of the Botanical Gardens but Kenny knew that they would never reach the Gardens, that somewhere along the way they would find a café, pop in for a cup of tea and a dish of ice cream then turn about and head for home. He didn’t much care. He was happy not to be stuck in St Andrew’s Street or diving about the city in pursuit of Irish bandits, meat-smugglers or would-be collaborators. Evidence of war was all around, of course. Shop windows were boarded up or sandbagged over, handsome sandstone tenements pitted with shrapnel, here and there a gap in the skyline, acres of waste ground heaped with debris to remind him that they were far from out of the woods.

  Among the strollers were lots of servicemen, and lots of pretty girls taking a breather after a long week’s work on an assembly line or in a packing plant. Different, the girls, more brazen but also more relaxed than they’d been eighteen months ago; they thought nothing of wearing trousers on a Sunday and clung to and even kissed their soldier boyfriends right there in broad daylight.

  Kenny steered the go-chair with one hand and held Rosie’s arm with the other, as if he were leading her into a charge room or a prison cell, the only kind of contact he was used to these days.

  Chewing on a huge new dummy-tit flavoured with brown sugar, Davy had been a dynamo of restless activity for the first half-hour or so. Held in check by the chair’s cross-straps, he had wriggled, chanted and pointed at interesting passers-by, especially those in uniform, and at the horse-carts and tramcars that rattled past the pavement’s edge. Then, gradually, his eyes had started to roll and he had grizzled a bit, the dummy had slipped from his mouth and hung on its wet ribbon on his chest. Rosie, cooing, had tucked the blanket round him and, sinking back, he had fallen asleep, oblivious at last to the passing show.

  ‘How did yuh-you do it, Kenny?’

  He had been thinking of other things and the question caught him unprepared. ‘What? Do what?’

  She altered her step, linked her arm with his and hugged him. Because of her handicap they faced each other and spoke like sweethearts new to the game of love.

  ‘Find him for me?’ Rosie said.

  ‘I didn’t find him for you, Rosie,’ Kenny said. ‘Polly found him.’

  ‘You turned a buh-blind eye, though, didn’t you?’

  ‘So did Nelson.’

  ‘Hoh! That’s not an answer.’

  ‘No, I suppose it isn’t,’ Kenny said.

  She had been crafty, his Rosie, waiting until they were out of the house to raise the subject, waiting her best chance, ready to pounce only when he least expected it; if she hadn’t been deaf she would have made a wonderful interrogator. He felt a sudden wave of love for his little deaf wife and all the turbulent emotions that had unsettled him during the past months drifted away.

  He pulled her close and kissed her on the lips.

  ‘Kuh-Kenny!’ she said. ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘Being a good girl.’

  ‘A guh-good girl?’

  ‘A bad girl then,’ he said.

  He had been sleeping in Fiona’s bed in Fiona’s room since Davy’s arrival, but last night, just before he closed his eyes, Rosie had entered the room, had scampered across the carpet and slipped into bed beside him wearing nothing but a brassiere and pants. It hadn’t taken him long to get those off for she had been eager, more than eager, to make love.

  When he thought of it now, the unromantic nature of their whispered conversation had actually increased his ardour.

  ‘Is Davy asleep?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yuh-yes.’

  ‘What about his teeth?’

  ‘Kenny, his teeth are fine.’

  ‘Are you certain he won’t waken?’

  ‘Stop uh-asking silly questions.’r />
  Then she had straddled his hips, pinned his arms behind his head and shut him up for good and all. It was still with him, the memory, the promise of that passionate hour in the darkness last night, and all the things, not just sex, that he’d missed in the months when he’d been holding their marriage together by the skin of its teeth had been suddenly restored.

  Working in Merryweather’s and the experience of life among the matrons had matured Rosie – the loss of the baby too – but now the time had come to begin again and the little boy in the pushchair was, Kenny supposed, a symbol of it. He saw a pattern here – he would, of course – a pattern that linked Babs to Polly, Polly to Rosie. But Polly’s sense of ownership was quite different from Rosie’s, tainted by a kind of selfishness that he, a male, would never be able to understand.

  He braked the pushchair gently to a halt.

  Rosie kneeled. He could see her knees beneath her skirt, her breasts pressing against the blouse, the line of her slender neck and her hair, still short, brushing her cheek. He was without desire, though, and without desire he loved her all the more. She tucked the blanket around Master Davy’s toes and glanced up.

  ‘Isn’t this better?’ Rosie asked.

  And Kenny, smiling for once, was forced to agree that it was.

  * * *

  The voyage to Lisbon took eight days and from first to last proved to be a nightmare. From the moment the Tantallon Castle steamed out of the Clyde and slapped into a moderate sea Christy was sick; no mere moaning and repining sort of sickness but a vile and violent retching so messy and painful that it threw him about his tiny cabin in the ship’s mid-section. There was no doctor on board. The second mate did his best with various substances from the medicine chest but Christy’s cameras remained in the bag and the drama of sailing with a British convoy went unrecorded.

  Christy found no relief at anchor in Milford Haven. The sea there was steeper than ever and even Polly suffered a queasiness that kept her on deck, breathing deeply and huddled inside a huge oilskin jacket that one of the crew had found for her. She had a cabin to herself, a narrow cubicle that reminded her a little of the larder back home except that the larder back home wasn’t constantly pitching and rolling. Even when she dug herself into the bedclothes in the high-sided bunk and clung on with both hands it seemed that she might be tossed out at any moment and go sliding across the floor to ram into a bulkhead or the rattling, brass-handled door.

  Manfully, though, she clawed her way to the galley to cadge hot tea for Christy, tea which soon wound up, like everything else, swilling across the floor of his cabin. Manfully, too, she presented herself for meals and managed to force down a few mouthfuls of whatever was on offer and, as it were, keep her end up with the officers.

  Christy and she were the only passengers and provided light relief for the crew. At first Polly thought the seamen cruel to mock poor Christy for his lack of sea legs but after her stomach settled and she began to feel at home both below and above deck, she also teased her prostrate lover and relayed colourful tales of his predicament to interested parties.

  The bridge and engine room were out of bounds but the other parts of the ship were open to her and she spent a great deal of each day leaning on the rail watching the convoy ships jockeying to keep station, which was no easy thing to do, apparently. There was one attack from the air soon after the convoy left harbour. Although Polly was sent below for her own protection, she could hear the chatter of the Lewis gun and feel the shudder through the plating. The Tantallon Castle’s starboard mid-ship accommodation was riddled with machine-gun holes but there were no casualties and emergency repairs were soon effected. One ship in the formation lost its bridge and navigational equipment to an aerial torpedo and had to limp back to Milford Haven unaccompanied.

  In spite of several alarms the convoy escaped attack by U-boats and was still complete when the Tantallon Castle peeled away well before dawn and, in an empty sea, steered a course for the mouth of the Tagus and the long, safe, neutral quays of Lisbon.

  * * *

  ‘Well, dearest,’ said Bernard, ‘I think we’ll be able to move home soon.’

  ‘Oh!’ Lizzie said, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. ‘How soon?’

  ‘Ten days or thereabouts,’ said Bernard. ‘What’s wrong? Don’t you want to get back to your own house?’

  ‘Our house.’

  ‘Yes,’ Bernard said. ‘Our house.’

  ‘What if there’s another air raid?’

  ‘We’ll be safe enough in the shelter, and if we’re damaged again I’m sure Polly won’t mind if we come back here.’

  ‘It isn’t up to Polly,’ said Lizzie, ‘not now she’s gone.’

  ‘Is that what’s biting you?’ said Bernard. ‘Are you worried about Polly?’

  ‘Aye,’ Lizzie admitted. ‘I am.’

  ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ Bernard said. ‘Anyway, she should be safe and sound in Lisbon by now, according to Dougie.’

  ‘What does he know about sailing?’

  ‘Dougie’s well informed about most things.’

  ‘Aye, but he can’t see beyond the tip of his nose,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘Really? What makes you say that?’

  ‘That Dawlish woman is after his money.’

  ‘His money? Dougie doesn’t have any money,’ Bernard said.

  ‘He has land,’ said Lizzie. ‘Isn’t land as good as money in the bank?’

  ‘It certainly will be,’ said Bernard, ‘after the war.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Lizzie. ‘Will you listen to me, talkin’ about land? I never thought when we were livin’ in the Gorbals an’ waitin’ for the rent collector to turn up that I’d be friendly with a man who owned property.’

  ‘I was the rent collector, remember?’ Bernard said.

  ‘So you were, so you were,’ said Lizzie.

  They were seated side by side on a bale of straw in the stable-barn in the twilight hour after supper. Bernard put an arm about her.

  ‘You don’t like Margaret Dawlish much, do you?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s a good housekeeper, I’ll say that for her,’ Lizzie conceded, ‘an’ she seems fond enough of the children, but…’

  ‘But?’

  ‘She’s just out for what she can get.’

  ‘You can hardly hold that against her,’ said Bernard. ‘She’s not sure what’ll happen when the war ends, if Polly will want her back,’ he paused, ‘or if Polly will be here at all.’

  He dropped the suggestion quietly into the conversation for he was unsure how much Lizzie understood of the situation or how deeply Polly had dug herself into trouble, not with the lawyer or the American but with her husband, Dominic.

  Whatever Lizzie thought of him, Dougie Giffard had his finger on the pulse and enough past experience of the Manones to realise that Dominic was sailing close to the wind. It was one thing to run local protection rackets and illegal street betting, to primp and preen down at the old Rowing Club and manage an import warehouse as a cover for selling stolen goods, quite another for Dominic to try to outwit the Intelligence services.

  ‘Not come back?’ said Lizzie. ‘Why wouldn’t she come back?’

  ‘She might decide to settle in America to be with the children.’

  ‘No,’ Lizzie shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘You can’t deny that she misses them.’

  Lizzie gave him a little push and disengaged herself. She stood up and brushed straw from her skirt, brushing and brushing as if to sweep away any suggestion that Polly might not return to Scotland.

  Bernard pushed himself to his feet too.

  He said, ‘It’s not … I mean, it’s not settled or anything but you couldn’t really blame her, Lizzie, if she wants to be with her family.’

  ‘We’re her family. I’m her family.’

  ‘We’re not, you know,’ he said, ‘not now.’

  ‘Blood will always be thicker than water,’ Lizzie said. ‘Won’t it?’

  ‘Lizzie,
Lizzie,’ he said, ‘the girls are grown up. They’ve set their own courses and there’s precious little we can do about it.’

  ‘Babs…’

  ‘I know Jackie’s only been dead for a wee while but he’s been gone for well over a year. The young man who came to see her today—’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Lizzie. ‘You don’t think he’s courting her, do you?’

  ‘Babs is a widow with four children. She’s entitled to – well, to look out for herself.’

  ‘I used to think you cared for my girls,’ Lizzie said. ‘You don’t care at all. You only care about yourself.’

  Her hands had fallen still. She didn’t fold her arms in a defiant attitude, though, but let them hang helplessly by her sides.

  Bernard felt a sudden wave of sympathy for his wife, for the confusion that the war had caused and what it might cost her in the long run. Young women risked losing their husbands, older women risked losing their sons but what women of Lizzie’s age risked losing was all sense of purpose.

  After the near-run thing with Evelyn Reeder – Lizzie would never know how close he had come to betraying her – he had finally found himself again. He had been wakened to the fact that what he had was all he would ever get, war or no war, and that his future and the future of the nation were so inextricably bound up that they couldn’t be separated. But how could he possibly explain to Lizzie that the future belonged to Babs, Rosie and Polly, and that wherever they might be, for better or for worse, they would always be Lizzie Conway’s girls.

  ‘I care for you,’ Bernard said. ‘I’ll always take care of you.’

  ‘God!’ Lizzie said. ‘Dear God! Is this what it’s come down to, that I need to be taken care of now like a baby or an invalid?’

  ‘No, no,’ Bernard said. ‘No, no, no.’

  She raised a hand helplessly, and let it fall.

  ‘See how bad it is?’ she said. ‘I don’t even know where Polly is.’

  ‘Well, that’s easily remedied,’ Bernard said. ‘We’ll go and look at a map.’

  ‘Dougie’s map?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bernard. ‘Dougie’s map.’

  ‘Bernard, where is she?’

  ‘Lisbon.’