Wives at War (42 page)

‘Really? I could have been dead under a pile of rubble, you know.'

‘It'll take more than German bombs to kill you, Fin,' Polly said. ‘I assume you were safely out of town?'

‘I was, as a matter of fact. I obtained a place for my ageds in a nice quiet hotel in Perthshire, drove them up there and stayed over. My flat suffered some damage but nothing major, nothing irreparable.' He paused and studied her. ‘I take it that you both escaped without a scratch?'

‘Sure did,' Christy said. ‘I guess we were lucky.'

‘And the house, Dominic's house?' Fin said.

‘Not in the best of states,' said Polly.

Four months ago, before Christy had stepped into her life, Polly would have told Fin all about Doreen Quinlan's death and what she had done with the child, would have fished for Fin's approval and pretended that callousness not concern had motivated her to hand the orphan over to her sister. Now, however, she decided to say nothing about the girl, the child, or her transatlantic telephone call from Dominic.

‘Habitable?' Fin said. ‘The house, I mean.'

‘Barely,' Polly said.

‘But you're still there, still living there?'

‘Yes.'

‘Both of you?'

‘Yes.'

She waited for him to offer to set in motion a little chain of events that would wind up with her installed, like his parents, in a private hotel in the country but Fin too had apparently reached the end of his tether. She could hardly blame him; in a sense, she had cheated Fin out of what he regarded as his just rewards and, with Christy seated by her side, could not pretend otherwise.

‘Fin,' she said, ‘do you have the money?'

‘Strange as it may seem,' Fin said, ‘I do.'

She had expected him to stall, to offer the blitz as an excuse for holding back, for holding on to her a little longer. He was still studying her – he had hardly so much as glanced at Christy – and what she saw in his eyes now wasn't resentment or anxiety but a peculiar sadness.

She said, ‘You managed to sell the foreign holdings, did you?'

‘Yes,' Fin said. ‘I sold them “forward” for much less than their worth.'

‘How much less?' said Polly.

‘I have a cheque for forty thousand, four hundred and ninety pounds.'

Christy let out a low whistle, hardly much more than a breath.

‘After or before taxes and the extraction of your fee?' said Polly.

She tried not to let Fin see that no matter how much she distrusted him she had never despised him, that all the games they had played together, in the bedroom and out of it, had added up to something that had come close to being a satisfactory relationship. In fact if she had been just a little more selfish they might even have forged a marriage and made it work.

‘After.' Fin opened a desk drawer and took out a single sheet of paper to which a cheque was clipped. ‘The summary,' he said. ‘Brokerage fees, taxes and my percentage are all accounted for. The cheque represents the balance.'

Polly glanced at the paper, neatly typed, dated and signed.

Forty thousand pounds was all that Fin had mustered all told.

The Scottish holdings, such as they were, the house, the car and a few other bits and pieces wouldn't add much to the total. She wondered if forty thousand pounds would be enough to buy Dom respectability. It seemed a trivial amount compared to the vast sums nations were spending on arms, and a mere drop in the ocean to the Government of the United States.

‘Are you disappointed?' Fin said.

‘Yes.'

‘It's the best I could do in the time allotted.'

‘I'm not blaming you, Fin.'

‘Good,' he said. ‘Good. What will you do now, my Polly?'

‘Deposit the cheque and await further instructions.'

‘From Dominic,' said Fin, nodding at Christy, ‘or from this gentleman?'

‘We'll be told what to do next,' said Christy.

‘Are you going with Polly to Lisbon?'

‘Yeah, I guess so.'

‘How romantic!' Fin said, with just the ghost of a smile. ‘And how unfortunate that Polly's husband will be waiting to greet you at the other end. I wonder if Dominic knows what's really going on? What do you think, Mr Cameron?' Christy didn't answer, didn't even shrug. Fin got to his feet. ‘Well, my Polly,' he said brusquely, ‘I do believe our business together is concluded. I've done all that's been asked of me.'

‘And been well paid for it,' Polly reminded him.

Fin gave a little bow. ‘Very true. When do you leave for Lisbon?'

‘Next week, or the week after.'

‘All that remains then,' Fin said, ‘is to wish you
bon voyage.
'

He shook Christy's hand and then, stepping from behind the desk, took Polly into his arms and kissed her with a tenderness that she had never encountered in him before. She held the kiss a moment longer than she'd intended and then, with the cheque in her purse, followed Christy out into the hallway and along to the elevator.

‘He isn't in love with you, Polly, is he?' Christy asked while the old machinery cranked them down to the ground floor.

‘No,' Polly said. ‘No, of course not.'

‘Forty grand,' Christy said. ‘It's not much, is it?'

‘I'm sure Fin's been feathering his nest at Dominic's expense,' Polly said, ‘and he thinks I'm going to let him off with it.'

‘No,' Christy said, ‘he thinks you aren't coming back.'

‘Not coming back? Of course I'm coming back,' said Polly with a lot more conviction than she, at that moment, felt.

*   *   *

Blackstone was hardly another country and Knightswood wasn't much more than fifteen miles away but Lizzie had always been a townie and Bernard had expected her to pine for her kitchen in the cottage row and badger him to take her back there as soon as possible. To his surprise Lizzie settled quickly to life in exile and seemed content to stay right where she was.

The children had a great deal to do with it. She'd missed the children more than he'd realised. Angus, June and May were pleased to have Granny Lizzie around and soon co-opted her as an ally in their little wars with Margaret Dawlish. Lizzie was careful not to tread on Miss Dawlish's toes or rub the housekeeper the wrong way, though, for however out of her depth she might be when it came to coping with a world gone mad, she was, Bernard realised, much more in tune with family feelings than he would ever be.

Poor old Dougie had been ousted from his room. Lizzie slept there in the narrow single bed while Dougie and Bernard dossed down each night in sleeping bags on the gallery floor in the stable-barn.

Fortunately there was no sting in winter's tail and Bernard knew that there were worse places to lay your head than a stable-barn. Legions of folk were camped out in schools and church halls or crammed into spare rooms in other people's houses, suffering not only the stress of being homeless but the even greater stress of being dubbed scroungers and layabouts by their landlords. So great was the pressure on him to find lodgings for the displaced that he had even been forced to board two families with Arthur Hunter Gowan. Naturally the surgeon's wife had kicked up Hades but Hunter Gowan had been oddly acquiescent, even, in his way, welcoming, for Bernard and he shared a secret now and were bonded by it.

Lizzie wasn't alone in enjoying the novelty of staying at Blackstone. Bernard also found the experience salutary.

After a chaotic day at the council offices, he would trudge up the farm track in the gloaming with a real sense of release, for family life, or a fair approximation thereof, appeased his guilt and pushed the affair-that-never-was further into the background. His lingering regrets about not being man enough to embark on a sexual adventure vanished when he gathered at the table with Babs's children, his wife and new-found friends. This, he thought as he looked around the supper table, was what he had risked losing for the sake of a furtive fling with a woman who was more admirable than admiring and whose sorrows he could never hope to understand, let alone relieve.

If he had been sharing a bed with Lizzie on those mild mid-March nights he might have whispered to her that he had been a fool to contemplate straying from the fold, might have told her that he loved her and that anything else had been but a silly aberration. Then to show that he not only loved but wanted her, he would have pushed up her nightgown and stroked her stomach, soothing and easing the way for lovemaking, for the satisfaction of that ineluctable and inexplicable desire that made a good marriage what it was.

Alas, he wasn't sleeping with Lizzie. He was dossed out in the stable-barn with Dougie Giffard wheezing and grunting in the straw at his side and the faint musty odour of the lumpy ex-army sleeping bag teasing his nostrils the way memory teases the mind.

‘What's wrong wi' you, Bernard?' Dougie rasped. ‘Can you not lie still?'

‘I was thinking of things,' said Bernard.

‘Things? What things?'

‘Just … things.'

‘Aw aye,' said Dougie. ‘I know all about those “things” too.'

‘I don't mean women,' said Bernard, hastily.

‘Women?' said Dougie. ‘I never thought you meant women. What've women got to do with anythin' at our age?'

‘Speak for yourself, Giffard.' Bernard tried to make light of it. ‘I'm a long way short of a trip to the boneyard.'

‘Aye, but you're married.'

‘Happily married,' Bernard added.

‘It's the kids I worry about,' said Dougie. ‘Angus without a proper father; the girls too, poor wee things.'

‘Babs will take care of them,' said Bernard.

‘Aye, I'm sure she will, but who'll take care o' her?'

‘Oh, someone will come along,' said Bernard. ‘Never mind the children, Dougie; what will become of us?'

‘Nothin',' Dougie told him. ‘Once this war is over we'll have had our day an' the rest will be up to the kids.'

‘God, that's a cheerful thought,' said Bernard.

‘Isn't it the truth, but?'

Bernard lay motionless on the bed of straw, arms by his sides, the sleeping bag drawn up to his chin. The ending of the war had become like a gigantic punctuation mark preceding a blank page and until that moment he had never considered what would become of him when the war ended.

He would continue to live in Knightswood, he supposed, in the house in the cottage row. He would hang on to a council job and support Lizzie until one or other of them died. He would watch Babs's children grow up and take as much pride in them as if they were his own. He would suffer when they made mistakes and would try not to impose on them all the old verities, all the outmoded values that he had learned before he went to fight in Kitchener's war, the sterling, imperishable truths that Fritz had tarnished beyond redemption in the trenches of the Somme.

Dougie was right: once the war was over the Giffards of this world, and the Peabodys too, would sink down into a haze of nostalgia, a soft, slow, coiling fog of remembrance and regret, and all that would be left to them would be the pride they'd once had and the shadow of the hopes they'd lost along the way.

‘Yes,' Bernard admitted. ‘It's the truth,' then turned on his side to sleep.

*   *   *

‘What can you tell me about Mr Giffard?' Margaret Dawlish said. ‘Does he really own land round about here or is he just spinning me a tale?'

‘I don't know,' Lizzie said. ‘I mean, I've only just met the man.'

‘But surely,' Margaret said, ‘you've heard your girls talk. They must have let something slip.'

‘Slip?' said Lizzie, frowning. ‘Is it a secret what Mr Giffard does?'

‘Not what he does – I know what he does – but what he owns.'

The women were alone in the farmhouse kitchen, sipping cocoa and nibbling ginger biscuits. The fire had burned low but Margaret was reluctant to put on more coal in case the bombers came again.

‘He used to be a printer, didn't he?' Lizzie said.

‘A long time ago. He drank himself out of job after job, so I've heard.'

‘His wife and children died,' said Lizzie.

‘Well, that's his excuse.'

‘It's a good excuse in my book,' Lizzie said. ‘Why are you askin' me all these questions?'

‘He fancies me.'

‘What?'

‘He fancies me, so there's very little likelihood he'd tell me the truth.'

‘Don't you fancy him?'

‘Phooh!' Margaret blew out her cheeks in scorn. ‘Look at him!'

Well, Lizzie thought, you're not exactly an oil painting yourself.

She sipped cocoa, said nothing.

Margaret Dawlish went on, ‘On the other hand, if he has a bit of money tucked away I wouldn't be averse to settling down here on the strict understanding that it would be a marriage in name only. I'll cook for him, wash his socks and clean his house but I won't – well, you know what I mean.'

‘I don't call that a marriage,' said Lizzie.

‘Anyway, I expect Dougie's well past it.'

‘Past what?'

‘All that lovey-dovey nonsense,' said Margaret.

Lizzie had her doubts that Douglas Giffard was anything like past it. He seemed to be as vigorous as any man of his age, which, she'd learned, was almost exactly her age. She was more embarrassed by Margaret Dawlish's callous attitude than by her oblique references to sex. Even now, after years of marriage, she loved having Bernard's arms about her, to feel the warmth of his body, his manliness, against her and to take him, welcomingly, inside her.

‘Would you…?' Lizzie hesitated. ‘Would you marry Mr Giffard just for his money?'

‘I like it here at Blackstone.'

‘Aye, it's a nice enough spot,' Lizzie agreed.

Reluctantly, almost sheepishly, Margaret Dawlish admitted, ‘Besides, I've nowhere else to go.'