by Anne Baker
‘No, little changes.’ James went back to finish his meal wondering if they’d had an argument in the car. His omelette had gone cold and was tasteless.
Five minutes later, Marcus appeared at the dining-room door and asked apologetically, ‘Do you have any lunch for us, Pa?’
‘You didn’t tell me what time you’d arrive. I’ll have to ask Mrs Trotter.’ He rang the bell for her.
‘I have some soup I can heat up in a few minutes for you, sir, and I can make you a sandwich.’
‘I’ll have some soup too,’ James said, pushing his empty plate away.
She picked it up. ‘Sorry, sir, there’s only enough soup for two. Shall I ask Dando to bring your pudding?’
Elvira sailed in looking like the lady of the manor. She was a big, tall woman who held herself well, with her large bosom thrust out before her. In her youth she’d had a pretty face and an hourglass figure but neither had lasted. Now she was getting older she was developing deep lines of discontent running from her nose to her mouth, but both she and Marcus looked very prosperous. ‘Thank you for taking us in,’ she said. ‘I hope we won’t have to trouble you for long.’
James hoped so too but he said, ‘You’re welcome to stay as long as you need, my dear.’
Dando appeared with the inevitable fruit salad which James’s doctor had advised to help his constipation. He looked at it with disfavour, today it was mostly stewed apple. Dando was setting two more places at the table.
‘We’ll go round the local estate agents this afternoon,’ Elvira said.
‘There’s Markham’s in the village, isn’t there?’ Marcus asked. ‘And Stanley Jones’s in Woolton. We’ll start there.’
‘I think they may have closed,’ James said slowly. He knew they had; many estates agents had closed their premises during the war as their trade shrank. The news caused a few moments of uncomfortable silence.
‘We’ve brought our ration books.’ Elvira pushed them across the table to him and snapped shut her crocodile handbag.
‘Oh dear, I know nothing about rationing.’ James pushed them back. ‘Dando deals with all that for me but I can’t ask him to buy for you too. Why don’t you cater for yourselves, Elvira?’
‘Good, I will.’ She sounded short. ‘Marcus can show me where the local shops are.’
There was another silence and then Marcus asked as their soup arrived, ‘What about dinner tonight?’
‘In the evenings I mostly eat out, except for the weekends,’ James said. The soup smelled delicious, he’d have preferred that to the omelette. ‘With a few friends,’ he added hastily. ‘Old fogies really, I don’t think you and Elvira would have much in common with them. It might suit you better if you found your own places to eat.’
‘Yes.’ There was no mistaking the relief on Elvira’s plump face.
‘And you can use your ration books to buy food for your other meals. I don’t get up for my breakfast so it’s just lunch I eat here, possibly more on Saturday and Sundays, but possibly not.’
James hoped he’d see John Maddox this evening at the Connaught Club. He’d spent his working life running an estate agent business and his son was carrying on, with offices in several suburban areas of the city. He would ask him to find a house for Marcus to buy. Or rent. A house of any sort, a flat, or rooms, furnished or unfurnished, anything. And there was Nigel to think of too. He was due to dock in Southampton in the next few weeks and it was no good expecting him to have fixed himself up with somewhere to live.
‘You’d think now the war is over things would be getting easier,’ Elvira said, biting into her sandwich.
‘They will soon,’ James said but she was soon into her conversational stride, going on about shortages. He got to his feet. ‘It’s time for my rest now. Why don’t you ask Mrs Trotter to show you round the kitchen? She comes only three mornings a week and would normally be gone before now. Perhaps I’ll see you at teatime. Dando usually makes a pot between four and five. Good luck with your search.’
Marcus held his breath as he waited for the door to click shut behind his father. He knew Elvira was seething and had held back until they were alone. ‘I can see we aren’t going to be made too comfortable here,’ she said. ‘You didn’t tell me we’d have to share a bathroom with your father and he’s not exactly welcoming, considering he hasn’t seen us for two years or more.’
‘He’s an invalid; we can’t expect much from him. We’ll have to look after ourselves.’
‘You mean I’ll have to look after you.’
‘We’ll find a place of our own just as soon as we can.’
‘And should anything decent ever come on the market, what are we supposed to use for money? You’re a damn fool, Marcus. You should have stayed put until you’d earned enough to buy us a house. It was ridiculous to get up and go on the spur of the moment as you did.’
‘You know why I had to,’ he said through clenched lips. ‘Don’t start on that again.’
It didn’t stop Elvira. ‘It was a stupid thing to do. Hamish said there was nothing to worry about.’
‘I thought there was. I don’t want to end up in jail and—’
‘Shush,’ Elvira hissed, as the door opened and Mrs Trotter came in.
‘If you’ve finished,’ she said, ‘I’ll take your plates. Shall I make you a cup of tea before I go, madam?’
‘Is there any coffee?’
‘No, I’m sorry.’
‘Tea will have to do then, thank you.’
As soon as they were alone again, Elvira went on, ‘For heaven’s sake don’t let anybody hear you saying things like that or you really will end up there. Don’t forget, our story is that we came straight from Catterick and that the army dispensed with your services yesterday.’
‘As if I could,’ he said angrily. ‘You have your cup of tea, and when you’re ready we’ll go out. I’m going upstairs to start unpacking.’
But once up in the bedroom, he viewed the mountain of luggage and couldn’t decide where to start. He eased off his shoes and threw himself on the bed to consider his position. It was the perennial problem that had dogged him all his life, a shortage of money.
In 1938 he’d started married life feeling he was the luckiest man alive. He’d been very much in love with his pretty new wife, who came from a well-heeled and generous family. He’d been working for a London insurance company at the time and her parents had given them a house in Streatham as a wedding present.
They’d both enjoyed a wonderful first year of marriage in London, their only problem being that his job hadn’t paid very well. Elvira had thought he could do better; she and the growing fear of war and of conscription had persuaded him to join the army. She’d been sure he’d be offered a commission if he volunteered, and she’d been right about that. To start with he’d enjoyed his time in barracks and he’d liked his officer’s uniform. Elvira visited his mess as often as ladies were invited, and sometimes when they were not. She got on very well with his fellow officers and their wives and said she enjoyed being an army wife, but almost all his pay went to settle his mess bill. Elvira turned out to be a lavish spender.
His first posting had been to Aldershot and Elvira had moved into a nearby hotel to be near him, but she’d left her friends behind and said she had nothing to do but wait for him to come off duty. To relieve the monotony she made frequent trips to London where she enjoyed shopping, restaurant meals with her friends and visits to the theatre.
‘Wouldn’t you feel more settled if you rented a flat or a cottage nearby?’ Marcus had suggested.
‘No point in getting settled there,’ she’d said, ‘you could be posted somewhere else at a moment’s notice. There’s a war on, you know,’ but gradually Elvira built up another circle of friends.
A year later, Marcus had been sent to Catterick and Elvira had
booked into another hotel there. It was the blitz that ended her trips to London and she put the house in Streatham on the market. Marcus assumed they’d always have enough money behind them to buy another house, but unfortunately while the blitz was on nobody had been keen to buy, and their first house had sold for less than it had originally cost.
When the war ended, the army began discharging personnel on the principle that those who had joined first were demobbed first, especially if their years of short service commission had expired. When Marcus was given a date in February 1946 and began thinking of a new career, he’d taken his first careful look at their finances and had the shock of his life. Elvira had run up a staggering debt in his name. He was more than shocked, he was frightened.
‘I’ll never be able to find a job that will let us live and pay interest on a debt like that,’ he’d said. ‘It’ll cripple us. It isn’t possible for me to earn that sort of money. You must ask your family for help, it’ll have to be paid off.’
Marcus insisted she went home immediately to do it, but he couldn’t bring himself to face her family while she did. He tried to close their joint bank accounts to stop her spending any more but he was summoned to an embarrassingly painful interview with his bank manager who told him he must start repaying the debt immediately.
When Elvira returned, he wished he’d gone with her and helped her plead for help, because she said, ‘Daddy says he can’t afford to give me any more money, I have three brothers and they need to keep every penny in their business because it suffered during the war.’
Marcus felt desperate. ‘We’ve got to get money from somewhere,’ he said, ‘absolutely got to.’
Chapter Eight
Elvira had had ideas about how it could be done, which she talked over at length with her army friends. As soon as the war ended, the government had begun to dispose of the weapons, vehicles, uniforms and a long list of general goods that the fighting forces no longer needed. Elvira told him her friends were applying themselves to the lucrative market of war surplus and Marcus felt he’d been drawn into the ring almost without being aware of it. He knew several of the other members, he’d served with some, and he was soon introduced to the civilian members.
Marcus spent the next fifteen months travelling the country to attend auctions of army surplus materials, mostly vehicles, but he’d been advised to say nothing about it. ‘It would be safer for us all if your family and friends at home think you are still in the army,’ he was told and he’d been sworn to secrecy.
The ring he’d joined often went to auctions twelve or fifteen strong. They aimed to buy as cheaply as possible by bidding only against strangers, never against each other. This could have a dramatic effect on the prices on which the auctioneer brought his hammer down.
Sometimes the ring held an unofficial auction between themselves afterwards, and the difference between the price the article had been bought for and the price it achieved now was their profit which they shared.
The members had also learned to sell on the goods. Armoured cars were sometimes knocked down to the ring for as little as £45, and Marcus had taken his turn at delivering them to several docks on the east coast, where he understood they were being shipped to Russia. The civilian market had a voracious appetite for cars, vans and lorries of every description. The ring learned to re-spray and re-register them and they sold like hot cakes.
Marcus had heard what they were doing described as collusion and it made him nervous but, even worse, he was afraid that sometimes the vehicles were stolen. He counted himself honest and hated the thought of theft, but he couldn’t control what the other members did.
It had become common knowledge amongst those who were interested that the government had sold off sixty operational bombers and a number of fighter bombers. Then Marcus heard from other members of the ring that first two Beaufighters and then two Mosquito fighter bombers had taken off from an airfield in Oxfordshire and neither the pilots nor the aircraft had been seen again.
It was rumoured that Special Branch had established they’d been sold to the Israelis and that had started an international hunt for those responsible. A week or two later he heard that two pilots had been arrested and further arrests of those running the scheme were expected shortly. Marcus knew that a member of his ring was involved and felt sure that the activities of other members would be investigated.
He was worried stiff. He’d thrown in his lot with them for long enough to pay off his debt, and now felt he had to stop and cut himself off from activities like that. Elvira wanted him to continue. ‘We need a house and a thousand other things. We need capital behind us. You’d be a fool to stop now.’
‘That’s easy for you to say,’ he objected. ‘The police won’t be after you. You’ll be in the clear whatever happens.’
‘Don’t be so silly,’ she said. ‘You didn’t steal anything. You didn’t sell armaments to other nations. All you did was odd jobs, running around at the beck and call of others who were doing those things.’
‘It was fraud and collusion,’ he said.
‘Nobody was hurt, it was only government money.’
‘That won’t stop me being charged.’ Marcus felt he’d been forced into doing it. Nothing else would have paid off the debt Elvira had run up. She tried to persuade him to carry on, but once he’d told the men running the ring that he wanted to stop there was nothing Elvira could do about it. They were not pleased, and he had to swear over again that he’d never mention the ring or anything about it to anybody. Fortunately, Greg Livingstone had been a good friend of Elvira’s family so Marcus had been allowed to drop out.
After that Elvira was keen for him to find a job. ‘I think you should either work for your family or mine,’ she’d said. ‘You’ll earn more that way than trying to work for someone who doesn’t know you.’
Marcus hadn’t liked that, it sounded as though she no longer trusted him to do well in the world. Elvira’s father was a formidable man and she had inherited many of his traits – both were dictatorial, self-opinionated and demanding. Marcus decided that working with his own family would be the better option, especially after he heard about Uncle Peter’s accident.
Elvira agreed, though for different reasons. ‘Your family will need you,’ she said. ‘Who else is there to run their business? This could be a good thing for you, and it’s the right time to start.’
For Marcus, once they reached Pa’s house everything seemed to go wrong. Elvira had forgotten what the house was like and said it was uncomfortable, and Pa dropped two bombshells at teatime that first afternoon. He said, ‘I’m expecting Nigel and his wife to come home from India within the next few weeks. He wants to work in the business too.’
That really upset Marcus, the last thing he wanted to do was to work with his brother. He’d never got on with him. Nigel had made it quite obvious that he thought him a dimwit. He’d looked down his nose at him. At school, the teachers had held Nigel up as a good example to him, whether it was for class work or on the games field. Nigel had acquitted himself well at Cambridge and landed a job he’d wanted in the Colonial Service, while he had struggled all his life to keep his head above water. Everybody seemed to like Nigel better. Marcus had had to accept that his brother outclassed him.
‘Where will they live?’ Elvira wanted to know.
‘Here with me – until they find a home of their own. Where else can they go?’
That shocked Marcus too and he could see Elvira wasn’t pleased, but Pa had even worse news for them. ‘Millie is going to inherit Uncle Peter’s half share in the business.’
‘Millie will?’ Elvira’s face fell.
Marcus swallowed hard, that was a setback. ‘Is Uncle Peter allowed to do that?’ he asked. ‘After all, it is a family business and should be kept in the family, not given to a girl like that. What about me and Nigel?’
�
�I don’t like it either but according to Alec Douglas, Peter’s will is legal and there’s nothing we can do about it. He says he’s applied for probate.’
‘But who is this Alec Douglas? Is he right?’
‘Of course he’s right. The business has been paying him a retainer to handle its legal problems for years. We’ve had one or two difficulties and he’s dealt with them satisfactorily, but Peter always liaised with him and I think they became quite friendly.’
‘So we can’t contest it?’
His father lost his patience. ‘There are no grounds on which we can.’
‘But that means we own a half share of the business between the three of us and the other half is owned by her.’
‘No, Marcus, it means I own the other half. You don’t own any shares.’
Marcus felt he’d been choked off and said no more, but Elvira said plenty to him as soon as they were alone. It rankled that Millie was going to own half the business. He hadn’t seen her for a few years but he remembered her well. A small, slight but friendly girl, of about his own age; he’d quite liked her when he was young, but she’d made her fortune by marrying his uncle. Over the next few days he and Elvira could think of little else.
When he next took afternoon tea with his father he said, ‘It isn’t fair that Nigel and I are going to run the business and own none of it. Millie is going to gain by our efforts, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, it means she will be entitled to a half share of the profits.’
‘Well, I don’t think that’s on. We won’t be able to earn enough to live on.’
‘If you and Nigel are running the business, you will both be earning a salary from it.’
‘But the same applies to her, and that doesn’t make me any happier.’ Pa didn’t realise how extravagant Elvira was. ‘Isn’t there some way we can ease her out of the picture?’
James sighed. ‘You and Nigel could offer to buy her share from her. In fact, I think you should.’