After the War is Over (6 page)

‘That seems a very strange attitude for an employer to take.’

Maggie went to bed. Tinker came with her and fell asleep on her feet. She lay there, listening to Mam and Dad talking downstairs and her little sister Bridie breathing softly in her bed on the other side of the room. After a while, she heard Rosie Hesketh in the hall saying good night. Ryan said in a loud voice, ‘See you in five minutes,’ and the front door closed. Five minutes later it opened again and Ryan came back in. Not long afterwards, he went to bed. He slept in the next room and made a terrible noise as he got undressed. The bed creaked violently when he got in, as if he’d dropped on it from a great height. Then there was silence, though she could still hear the murmur of her parents’ voices downstairs, and Tinker’s loud purring.

Feeling content that her family were all safe and sound under the same roof, she prayed for everyone she knew, snuggled beneath the clothes and thought about Chris Conway.

He both disturbed and fascinated her, and she didn’t know what to make of him. What was his background? She hadn’t thought to ask any of the numerous questions she wished she could ask now. She must try to memorise them so she could ask on Wednesday.

She fell asleep with the memory of them dancing and his arm in the small of her back; their cheeks pressed together and his breath on her ear. She had a feeling that he’d actually kissed her ear.

Am I in love? she asked herself, but didn’t get an answer.

‘Maggie met this dead funny chap at the Grafton on Saturday,’ Nell told Iris on Wednesday. She’d got into the habit of calling early on Wednesday afternoon, when she and Iris would have a pot of tea and a sarnie together. She told her mother, who didn’t like being left alone, that she was going to church. To save it from being a lie, she always called in at St James’s on the way and lit a candle.

‘What’s his name?’ Iris asked.

‘Chris Conway.’

‘And what’s funny about him?’

‘Well, it’s funny peculiar, not funny ha ha. He told us he’d been an officer in the RAF, then later on, after he’d brought us home, he told Maggie that was a lie and he’d been an aircraft engineer. The reason he told her the truth was because he wants to marry her.’

‘Good heavens!’ Iris put the teacup in the saucer with a crash. ‘And is Maggie going to marry him?’

‘I think she’s a bit gobsmacked, if the truth be known. She’s seeing him tonight and he’s taking her to see
Buffalo Bill
at the Forum in town. I’ll let you know next week what happens. Oh, and Maggie said it was all right to tell you, so I’m not spreading gossip, like.’

‘That’s good. I’d love to know how she gets on.’

There was a real Red Indian actor in
Buffalo Bill
called Chief Thundercloud, as well as Maureen O’Hara, who Maeve McSharry from Amethyst Street swore had lived next door to her when she was a child in Ireland.

‘I always knew she was going to be a famous film star,’ Maeve claimed, though not a single soul believed her.

After the film, Chris took Maggie to the Lyons in Lime Street for a cake and a cup of tea and proceeded to tell her his life story. He was every bit as handsome as she remembered, perhaps even more so this week than last. There was something terribly romantic about his green eyes and slightly-too-long hair. He could easily have been a poet. The knot on his tie was askew, only adding to his rakish charm.

His parents had been in show business, he told her. They were dancers and called themselves Antonia and Antonio. ‘There are loads of stage pictures of them at home. They danced in theatres all over the country, from the very top ones to the very bottom. They never had a proper home, so when my father dropped dead on the stage of the Rotunda Theatre in Liverpool, my mother found a flat and stayed here.’

‘Whereabouts in Liverpool is the flat?’ Maggie asked, wishing she could feel more certain that she believed him.

‘Everton Valley. Nowadays she makes clothes for dancers. You should see some of the dresses she turns out.’

‘I’d really like to see them,’ Maggie said.

‘Then you shall,’ he said grandly. ‘I’ll ask her to invite you to tea.’

‘And what do you do?’ she asked.

He sold a lotion called Kure from door to door, he told her, in such a dramatic, impressive way that it made him seem as if he was on his way to curing the entire world of every known disease, internal and external, starting with Liverpool. ‘It only costs one and ninepence a bottle.’

He insisted on accompanying her back to Bootle on the tram. Outside the front door of her house, he kissed her on the cheek and invited her to the Grafton on Saturday.

‘Only if Nell can come too,’ Maggie said. ‘Saturday, we always go dancing together.’ She couldn’t possibly desert Nell.

‘I would love to see Nell again,’ he assured her, with the utmost sincerity.

Chapter 3

‘I think she’s going to marry him,’ Nell said.

Iris gasped. ‘Really! Has she said anything to that effect?’ Sometimes she felt as if she and Nell were like leeches, using Maggie’s fascinating life to provide excitement to their own dull ones. Unlike them, Maggie had put army life behind her and become absorbed in the world as it was now.

‘Her actual words were,’ Nell continued breathlessly, ‘ “We’re going to get married one day
soon
.” They’re waiting until Chris gets a better job and they’ve got somewhere to live.’

‘Well, both the job and the house could take a while.’ Male unemployment was increasing as more and more men were demobbed and returned to civilian life. Not only that, due to the air raids having destroyed so much property, there was a desperate shortage of houses. ‘Once we have the National Health Service, Chris isn’t likely to sell any more of that dubious medicine,’ Iris went on.

Iris hadn’t met Chris, but she had a picture of him in her mind; rather bohemian, with laughing eyes and a daring expression. Sometimes she imagined him wearing a short black cape and a wavy hat, not exactly the uniform of a door-to-door salesman.

‘Anyway,’ Nell continued, ‘they’re considering getting engaged at Easter.’

‘That’s only a few weeks off,’ Iris mused. ‘What sort of ring does she fancy?’

‘A diamond solitaire. Apparently, Chris’s mother said she can have hers.’

Iris examined her own diamond solitaire engagement ring. The day Tom had bought it had been tremendously exciting. She recalled going to lunch at Frederick & Hughes afterwards and waving her hands all over the place in the hope that people would notice the way it sparkled. These days, she often forgot to put it on. ‘Oh, Nell, there’s something I must tell you: Tom has agreed to make Thursday the day he has his afternoon off, so you and I can go into town to the pictures or the theatre and afterwards have afternoon tea.’

Instead of looking pleased, Nell’s pleasant, good-natured face fell. ‘That’s nice,’ she mumbled, though it was obvious she didn’t mean it.

‘What’s wrong?’ Iris asked gently.

‘Well, I haven’t got any money, have I? I mean, not enough for cinemas or theatres or meals in restaurants. Me dad only gives us half a crown a week.’

‘Half a crown! But that’s disgraceful. It’d cost him at least fifteen shillings to get a woman in to do what you do.’ Iris had conjured up a picture of Nell’s father in her head too. He looked very much like Charles Laughton in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
. In other words, as ugly as sin. She remembered at Christmas having vowed to do something about Nell. Now seemed to be the time.

She discussed her idea with Tom that night. He was the most easy-going of men. As long as it didn’t interfere with his duties as a doctor, he was inclined to agree to anything Iris suggested, leaving her to wonder why she didn’t love him considerably more.

‘It sounds as if it’s something that will be of benefit to both you and Nell,’ he said when she told him what she had in mind. He had met Nell and liked her very much. ‘Go ahead, by all means,’ he finished with an approving nod.

‘I’ll have a word with her when she comes next week.’

‘What we would like,’ she said to Nell the following Thursday, when they were both seated at the table in the kitchen over a pot of tea, ‘is for you to come and make our evening meal for us five afternoons a week, and sometimes on Sundays when we have Tom’s relatives to lunch or dinner. You’d only have to be here at the most two hours a day. The pay would be ten shillings, and extra if you came at the weekend.’ Ten shillings meant little to her and Tom, but was a small fortune to someone like Nell.

To her dismay, Nell frowned. ‘You’re asking because last week I said me dad only gave us half a crown,’ she said crossly. ‘That’s charity, that is. I don’t want charity off nobody, thanks all the same.’ She jumped to her feet, knocking over the chair and making a terrible clatter. ‘I think it’d be best if I never came again.’

Iris wanted the floor to swallow her up. ‘If you didn’t come again, I don’t know what I’d do, Nell. You are the person who keeps me sane. I can talk about things with you that I can’t with anyone else, certainly not Tom. I can’t discuss with him the lovely time we had in the camp at Plymouth. And I
do
want a cook, honestly I do. I’m hopeless with food; I really hate cooking.’ She burst into tears and buried her face in her arms.

‘Oh dear, Iris. I’m sorry. Of course I’ll cook for you, but you don’t have to pay me.’

‘To have making dinner taken out of my hands is worth a fortune to me,’ Iris said passionately. ‘But I don’t want you to come if I can’t pay you.’

Nell shrugged helplessly. ‘Oh, all right, I’ll do it. But I’ll have to ask me dad first. Y’see, I’m not supposed to leave me mam for all that long.’

Maggie didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when Betty Conway showed her the engagement ring. Of course, she did neither, just took it politely and thanked her extravagantly.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said in an awed voice, ‘absolutely beautiful.’ It was also incredibly tiny, little more than a pinprick in the narrowest of gold bands. Thank goodness she hadn’t mentioned the ring to her family. She’d feel too embarrassed to let anyone see it.

‘Try it on,’ Betty urged.

Maggie did so, hoping it would be much too big or too small and she could refuse it, but it fitted perfectly. ‘I can’t thank you enough,’ she said, in the same awed voice.

‘It looks magnificent, darling,’ Betty said huskily. This must be one of her Marlene Dietrich days. She also had Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn days. Once Maggie married Chris, she would have the most interesting mother-in-law in Liverpool, except Betty was moving back to London and bequeathing Maggie not only her ring, but her flat and her handsome son.

Since her husband, Antonio, had died on stage in Liverpool and her own dancing days had come to an end, Betty had lived on the top floor of a four-storey house in Everton Valley. From the window, the tops of ships could be seen on the distant river. The main room had a sloping ceiling and was at least thirty feet square, while the two bedrooms, the rough-and-ready bathroom and the kitchen were exceptionally small.

About a quarter of the main room was taken up by a large table heaped with glorious dresses. Because there was a shortage of material in the shops, along with everything else, Betty was turning old dresses into beautiful new ones by taking yards of net off one to put on another, switching frills and bows, adding sequins here and fancy buttons there, and coming up with a differently styled garment altogether.

According to Chris, she had become as well-known and successful in the dancing world as a dressmaker as she had been as a dancer.

There were posters of Antonia and Antonio on the walls, including an overlarge one, a painting showing a magnificent couple dancing the flamenco, the woman wearing brilliant scarlet and the man with a black mask over his eyes just like Tyrone Power in
The Mark of Zorro
. Whilst this wasn’t an exact likeness of the pair, it had been on show outside the theatre the only time they’d been top of the bill.

‘It was in a place called Stoke Newington,’ Betty had told her.

Betty was about fifty and still magnificent. Today she wore a long navy silk gown patterned with orange poppies, an orange sash around her narrow waist, bangles on both wrists, and glittering earrings that skimmed her shoulders. Her brown hair, liberally streaked with grey, was piled untidily on top of her head.

There were footsteps on the stairs. ‘Ah, here is Chris now,’ she said.

Maggie had been invited to tea, and Chris had been sent to buy fish and chips. There were bottles of wine and vinegar on the table – a different table to the one with the costumes on – along with three highly ornamental glasses, three beautifully embroidered napkins and an assortment of fancy cutlery, none of which matched.

Chris entered the room and Maggie could have sworn that her heart stopped beating. She was so much in love that she could hardly concentrate on anything else, not her family, not her work, not her friends. He smiled right at her and her heart stopped again. One of these days she was sure she’d have a heart attack, or her heart would stop beating altogether.

‘I like him,’ Maggie had heard her mother say after the first time she’d brought Chris to the house. She’d been sitting on the stairs quite shamelessly eavesdropping on her parents discussing her new boyfriend. ‘He’s a bit out of the ordinary, just right for our Maggie.’

Dad had begged to differ. ‘He’s a funny sort of bugger. Hasn’t got a trade. I can’t figure out a man without a trade.’ Paddy O’Neill was a centre lathe turner and proud of it.

‘He’s interesting,’ Mam claimed. ‘We talked for ages about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. He’s seen every one of their pictures.’

‘So have a lot of people. That’s nothing to boast about,’ her father growled. ‘It might be a good idea if he found something more useful to do with his time, like earn a proper wage instead of selling that vile mixture that’s probably ruining the health of the nation.’

‘I had a letter today from my friend Susan in London,’ Betty said now, waving a sheet of mauve notepaper. ‘She’s really looking forward to us living together in Crouch End. She’s been a theatrical agent for years, but started off as a dancer like me and Antonio.’ She always referred to her husband by his stage name rather than his real one, which was Gordon.