Wives at War (54 page)

‘I don't know what to do with my kids.'

‘I see,' said Archie, nodding. ‘Are they happy where they are?'

‘Yeah, pretty much.'

‘Then leave them there.'

‘I miss them,' Babs said, ‘'specially at holiday time.'

‘What did you do at Christmas?' Archie enquired.

Babs began to cry.

She was seated at the Underwood with all the paraphernalia of files, forms and envelopes spread about her. She reached into her purse, tugged out a handkerchief and dabbed her eyes.

‘Sorry,' she said.

‘Nowt to be sorry about,' said Archie. ‘It's your husband, isn't it?'

‘Yeah.' Babs swallowed her tears. ‘It was just about the last thing we talked about before Jackie went overseas: the children, what I'd do with the kids at Christmas. I didn't realise I'd never see him again. I think it's just beginning to sink in. I mean, who am I gonna talk to now?'

‘Talk to me, if you like.'

She looked up at him, smiled blearily, and said, ‘If I can get a word in edgeways.'

Archie said, ‘I'm going to put an arm about your shoulder, Mrs H. I'm warning you of my intention because I don't wish it to be misconstrued. Is that all right?'

‘Fine,' Babs said. ‘In fact, I wish you would.'

He pushed away a pile of folders, seated himself on the desk and put an arm about her. Babs cried some more. Archie said nothing until the little spasm eased and she let out a sigh. He tactfully removed his arm but remained seated on the desk, close to her.

‘Have you heard from your sister?' he asked.

‘Polly?'

‘That's the one.'

‘Not a word,' Babs said. ‘Why?'

‘Do you still have charge of her motorcar?'

‘Yeah, it's parked in our drive.'

‘If,' said Archie, ‘I could pick up a few petrol coupons, you could stay over with the kids at the farm and motor back and forth to work during the Easter holiday. Would that help?'

‘Petrol coupons?' Babs said. ‘How would you…?'

‘I'm the manager of a government department engaged in vital war work,' said Archie, ‘and I have unimaginable powers of persuasion, in case you hadn't noticed. I'll request a modest allocation of petrol coupons and by the time the powers that be discover that the department doesn't actually have a motorcar Easter will be long gone and we can start worrying about the summer vacation.'

‘Archie, that's cheating.'

‘I think I prefer to regard it as using the system to one's advantage.'

‘And I thought you were a man of principle.'

‘Hang principle!' said Archie. ‘Would it help?'

‘Would it ever!' said Babs.

*   *   *

Reading the newspapers from headlines to small ads on the walk back from school every morning had become a habit that Dougie couldn't break.

With every ugly twist in the unfolding tale of German aggression, however, he became more and more depressed. He imagined Polly Conway Manone dying of thirst in the desert or lying under a pile of rubble in the streets of Belgrade. Complete fantasy, of course; Polly was a thousand miles from North Africa and about the same, or further, from Yugoslavia. With all this useless geographical information packed away in his head, he still couldn't make sense of the war. Now, Rommel's
Afrika Korps
were snapping up all the desert towns that the British Army had taken from the Italians four or five months ago, Greece had been invaded and the Luftwaffe had blasted the undefended city of Belgrade. And as if all that wasn't bad enough, the Chancellor of the Exchequer had just increased income tax to ten shillings in the pound and Dougie's modest income had become more modest still.

During his ‘lost years', when nothing mattered except whisky and keeping the cat fed, he had lived without a care in the world on the handouts that Dominic Manone had provided. Now he had rejoined the community of sober citizens, though, money loomed large once more. He didn't want the children to leave Blackstone, and he didn't want to lose Maggie Dawlish, but he knew that in time they would go, all go, and he would be alone again, with just the cat, the pig and the bottle for company.

He still had a few acres of land but regulations regarding the sale of land had become so strict that he doubted if he would be allowed to sell them. He'd have starved in the street before he'd have stolen a single diamond from Dominic's hoard, of course, but having the gemstones buried under Ron's trough had been a comfort and he had felt like a traitor digging them up and handing them over to the authorities, even though that's what Dominic wanted him to do.

The stones had been delivered in a heavy brown-paper parcel, together with handwritten instructions, about three weeks after Dominic's disappearance.

Horse sense suggested that Dominic was safeguarding himself against a future in which banknotes might have no more value than the German mark in the wake of the last Great War and that if Dominic was making contingency plans, perhaps he, Douglas Giffard, should do the same. Contingency plans? God, what sort of plans could you possibly make when the world was teetering on the brink of disaster? Now, with the diamonds gone, and Polly too, he was thoroughly defenceless and must take the future on trust just like everyone else.

Nose buried in the
Bulletin
he was halfway up the track before he noticed Lizzie Peabody trotting towards him, waving a beige envelope.

Dougie stopped dead in his tracks, the newspaper falling from his hands. Polly, he thought; Polly drowned; Polly blown out of the sky; Polly shot in the streets of Lisbon by a German spy. For an instant he couldn't find the strength to make his legs work and stood stock-still while the big woman rushed towards him, waving the cablegram above her head.

‘What?' Dougie roared. ‘What's happened?'

‘It's Polly.'

‘Oh Christ, oh Jesus!'

Panting, Lizzie Peabody leaned forward, one hand on her knee, the other pressed to her chest. She wore a floral apron and house-slippers. Her stockings had slipped their moorings and were halfway down her legs.

‘It – it's our Polly,' she gasped.

‘Is she dead?'

‘No, she's not dead. She's going to America.'

Shock and relief ran through Dougie like an electrical current. He wanted to weep, to laugh, to throw himself down on his knees and thank a God in whom he did not believe for sparing Lizzie Conway's daughter. Instead, he put a hand on Lizzie's shoulder, extracted the cable from her grasp and read it.

‘She says she's going to the States to be with the children,' he said.

‘An' I'll never see her again.'

‘Course you will, Lizzie.'

‘None o' us will ever see her again.'

‘After the war—'

‘After the war, after the war: I'm sick of hearing about “after the war”,' Lizzie cried. ‘Maybe I won't be here after the war. Maybe none o' us will.'

‘Now, now,' Dougie said, ‘you mustn't talk like that.'

‘I'll talk any way I like,' Lizzie snapped. ‘It's all very well for you, Dougie Giffard, you don't know what it's like to lose a daughter.'

He had been on the point of offering sympathy, but he was hurt by the fact that she had forgotten that he had lost not a daughter but a wife and two small sons.

‘Do you want me to fetch Bernard?' Dougie asked.

‘Bernard'll be busy,' Lizzie answered.

She reached out and snatched the cable from him. She peered at the paper slips pasted to the form and stroked her fingers across them as if she thought there might be a hidden message, a secret code that the censors had somehow failed to detect.

She said, ‘I want to go home.'

‘All right,' said Dougie. ‘We'll go home. A nice cup of tea will—'

‘Home,' Lizzie said, ‘to Knightswood.'

‘I thought you liked it here?'

‘I've come to the conclusion that it's not where I belong.'

‘Course it is. You belong with your grandchildren.'

‘They don't care about me.'

‘For God's sake, Lizzie,' Dougie said, ‘what's wrong with you? All this weepin' an' wailin' just because Polly's off to America to look after her children. You can't blame her for that.'

‘She should have stayed here,' Lizzie said, ‘with us.'

Then she set off back towards the farmhouse, leaving Dougie to gather up the pages of his newspaper and angrily follow on.

*   *   *

Bernard was quite phlegmatic about packing up and leaving Blackstone immediately after supper. He had grown accustomed to Lizzie's oscillating moods and whatever Lizzie might suppose to the contrary he was not unsympathetic. She was growing old, that was the long and short of it. Losing her children had hit her hard. She needed them to need her and the fact was that they no longer did.

She had grieved less for Jackie, whom she'd never liked, than for Babs and was less than pleased now that Babs had attracted the attention of another, younger man. She had also been mightily annoyed to learn that Rosie had adopted a war orphan. Polly, though, had always been Lizzie's favourite because, Bernard suspected, Polly, like Lizzie in her heyday, had a mind of her own and a will of iron. Drape a woman in a ragged shawl and hang a mewling baby on her arm, Bernard thought, and she automatically becomes a heroine; wrap that woman's daughter in a Jaeger overcoat and send her off in an aeroplane to America and she immediately seems like a bitch. In other words, all the virtues that Lizzie had once displayed had become, in Polly, vices.

He could not for the life of him reconcile such conflicting attitudes. He was by nature conservative but there was enough flexibility left in him to understand what Polly and her sisters were about and to look past them to the generation of children they would raise and the values those children would inherit. He hoped he might live long enough to see not just an end to this terrible conflict but an end to pettiness, to spite and envy and all the class-ridden inhibitions that had marred his young manhood.

Angus lugged the suitcase down to the bus stop, skipping to keep up with Grandma.

‘You're in an awful hurry, Gran,' he said.

‘We don't want to miss the last bus.'

‘Couldn't you have waited till the morning?'

‘Grandpa Bernard has work to go to in the morning.'

‘Is it the noise?' Angus said. ‘I can keep the girls quiet, if you like.'

‘It's not the noise.'

‘Is it the smells then. If you stayed, you'd get used to them.'

‘It's not the smells either,' Lizzie told him.

Grandpa Bernard had already reached the gate, suitcase in one hand, a big soft bundle knotted with string in the other. Dougie, sulking, had stayed in the farmhouse and the girls and Miss Dawlish had waved goodbye from the window.

‘I don't see why you have to go,' Angus swung the suitcase from one hand to the other and scuttled up behind the woman. ‘Don't you like us any more?'

She stopped so abruptly that Angus almost ran into her broad backside. Carefully she put down her shopping bag. There were fresh eggs in it and a bottle of milk and she didn't want them to break or spill. She peered down at her grandson. She didn't have to peer far for Angus was almost, if not quite, as tall as she was and in a couple of years would be standing shoulder to shoulder with Bernard. She inspected him as if he were some weird creature she'd never seen before and she didn't know whether to be afraid of him or not.

Angus was going to say, ‘It's me, Gran, just me,' but her eyes looked funny, her mouth was all pulled down and the expression on her face was more than just a scowl.

‘Of course I like you, Angus,' Lizzie said. ‘It's – it's not you, or the girls.'

‘Is it because Auntie Polly's not comin' back?'

It was, she knew, the sort of question to which she should give a proper answer but she was just a stupid old woman who had raised three ungrateful daughters. She didn't know what she was doing stalking off in the huff but more and more she found herself doing things that the old Lizzie Conway would never have done, not in a million years. She had been too dependent on her daughters, had given too much of herself to them, and now there was nothing left.

‘Auntie Polly's going to live in America,' Lizzie said.

‘With Mr Cameron?' Angus asked.

Lizzie reared back as if her grandson had struck her. It hadn't occurred to her that Stuart and Ishbel might have no part in Polly's plans, that it was the American, not the children, who had lured Polly away.

‘She's goin' to look after your cousins,' she said.

‘That's all right then,' Angus said.

‘What's all right?' said Lizzie, frowning.

‘I thought it was just us you were fed up with.'

She gave a little
tut
at her selfish disregard for her grandchildren's feelings, and said, ‘You'll understand when you're older, Angus.'

‘It's not our fault Auntie Polly's gone away.' He shrugged and lifted the heavy suitcase once more. ‘I mean, at least she'll come back some day.'

She looked at the half-grown boy and felt a pang of guilt at her heartlessness. Most of the ills she had suffered throughout her life had been of her own making but this poor lad had lost his father through no fault of his own.

‘Angus,' she called out.

He went on, ignoring her now, leaning against the weight of her laden suitcase, struggling with it, endeavouring to be a man. Lizzie ran after him, not caring about the eggs or the milk. She caught him by the shoulder just as he reached the gate. Bernard was across the road at the bus halt, seated on the other suitcase, smoking a cigarette.

‘Angus?'

‘What?' he said grumpily.

She got down stiffly on her knees and put her arms about him, the shopping bag still in her hand. There was no grace in the manner of it but the intention was clear enough even to a ten-year-old.