Women on the Home Front Page 21

  It was just gone seven thirty when Callum knocked on the door to number 13.

  Unable to stay on her own in her room as she had intended, Sally had gone back downstairs to the kitchen where Olive had been putting the final coat of icing on her Christmas cake. Watching her, Sally had immediately been transported back to her childhood and her own mother’s kitchen. Tilly didn’t realise how lucky she was to have her mother, but at least Sally knew what it was to have a mother’s love, unlike poor Agnes, who was perched on a kitchen stool happily helping to cut out red berries and green Christmas trees from the marzipan to which green and red colouring had been added by Tilly as the two girls did their bit towards decorating the cake.

  ‘I’ll go,’ Olive announced when they all heard the door, putting down in a bowl of hot water the palette knife with which she had been smoothing the royal icing, then removing her apron before heading for the door.

  Sally let her go. It was going to take all the emotional and mental strength she had to face Callum.

  When Olive opened the door to Sally’s visitor, she felt very much as Tilly had done when she’d first seen him, liking his strong manly features and feeling reassured by his friendly smile. The uniform did its bit to establish him as someone to be trusted, of course. But then Sally had never said that he was someone who could not be trusted, and Olive could well understand why her lodger did not want to see him. She admired Sally’s love and devotion for her late mother and sympathised with her feelings.

  Callum’s, ‘I’d like to see Sally if she’ll see me,’ received a small inclination of Olive’s head and a calm, ‘Yes. She is expecting you. If you’d like to come this way . . . ?’

  He wasn’t wearing an overcoat, and since she wasn’t sure what the etiquette was with regard to the naval officer’s cap that he was carrying, she didn’t like to offer to relieve him of it.

  She showed him into the front room, its gas fire hissing warmly and its green, fern-print curtains drawn over the blackout fabric to give the room an air of cosy warmth.

  Olive was very proud of her front parlour. She had redecorated it herself, painting the walls cream, with the picture rail painted the same green as the curtain pelmet. A stylish stepped mirror hung over the fireplace. The linoleum was patterned to look like parquet flooring and over it was a cream, dark red and green patterned carpet. The dark green damask-covered three-piece suite had been a bargain because there’d been a small tear in one of the seat cushions, and on the glass and pale wood coffee table, which was Olive’s pride and joy, was a pretty crystal bowl that had caught her eye in an antique shop just off the Strand.

  A radiogram in the same pale wood as the coffee table stood against the back wall behind the sofa, and Olive couldn’t help but give a very satisfied glance around her front room before telling Callum that Sally would be right with him and then whisking through the door.

  When Olive opened the hall door into the back room, Sally was already getting up from her chair, her face set and tense.

  ‘I haven’t offered him a cup of tea or anything,’ Olive began anxiously.

  ‘No, please don’t,’ Sally begged her. ‘I don’t want to encourage him to stay.’

  In the hall outside the front-room door Sally took a deep breath and smoothed her damp palms against the pleats in her neat flecked tweed skirt. She’d bought the skirt on a shopping trip with Morag early on in the autumn before her mother had died. Morag had said how much the heather colours had suited her, bringing out the colour of her eyes, and had persuaded Sally to buy a pretty violet twinset to go with the skirt. She wasn’t wearing that twinset now. Instead she had chosen a plain dark blue blouse.

  She took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

  Callum was standing on the hearthrug with his back to the fire, his hands folded behind his back. Seeing him in uniform was disconcerting. In her memories of him he was always wearing his patched tweed jacket softened by wear, a Tattersall checked shirt worn with a sleeveless pullover, and a pair of cavalry twill trousers. In his naval uniform he looked taller, stood straighter, the slight scholarly stoop she remembered gone. She looked away from him, aware of the pulse beating in her throat and the unwanted pang of longing seeing him brought her. His cap was on the coffee table.

  ‘You’re in the navy.’

  It was stupid thing to say, but somehow the words had formed and were spoken, sounding, to her own dismay, almost like a reproach, as though she had the right to reproach him for doing something without her knowledge.

  ‘Yes. Sublieutenant. I’ve just finished my training at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, and I should receive orders as to which ship I’m to join pretty soon.’

  He paused and then came towards her, saying, ‘Sally . . .’ Immediately she stepped back from him, holding up her hands as though to ward him off, relieved when he moved away.

  ‘Your father misses you,’ he told her abruptly, ‘and so too does Morag.’

  ‘He’s all right?’ Sally couldn’t hold back her anxiety.

  Immediately Callum’s smile deepened, as he said reassuringly, ‘Yes, apart from the fact that he misses you.’

  Sally stiffened and turned her head away as she told him fiercely, ‘I miss my mother and I always will.’

  ‘Sally, you aren’t a child,’ he told her in a sharp voice. ‘I can understand your loyalty towards your mother but do you really feel she would want this? For you to cut yourself off from your father?’

  ‘He cut himself off from her and from me when he married Morag.’

  ‘You’re being unfair.’

  ‘I’m being unfair?’ She made a small bitter sound. ‘Morag married my father three months after my mother’s death.’

  ‘Your mother would never have wanted your father to be alone; she would have understood.’

  ‘Understood what? That your sister, and my best friend, whom she had treated as another daughter, was offering him the . . . the comfort of an intimate relationship whilst she lay dying? And as for my father being alone, he would have had me. I’d like you to leave. Now. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t know why you came here. After all, I’ve made my feelings plain enough. Your sister betrayed our friendship and the kindness my mother showed her.’

  ‘Your mother encouraged them to be together.’

  ‘Not in that way! You say that because it’s what you want to believe, because Morag is your sister, but it isn’t the truth.’

  ‘Because you don’t want it to be the truth? Your mother wanted your father to be happy, to be cared for and loved as she had cared for him and loved him. She told Morag so.’

  ‘Do you really expect me to believe that? Well, I don’t.’

  ‘I thought better of you than this, Sally, I really did.’

  Now his voice had become colder, sharper, critical, stabbing into the soft vulnerability of her emotions.

  ‘Just as I thought better of your sister,’ Sally defended herself. ‘Now we’ve both been disappointed. How would you have liked it, Callum, if our positions had been reversed? It’s all very well for you to come here and tell me how I should feel; you’re bound to take Morag’s side.’

  ‘Sally, it isn’t a matter of taking sides. Your father loves you and misses you. I know you were upset and shocked by their marriage, but surely out of your love for your father – and I know that you do love him – and the friendship that you and Morag shared, you can find it in your heart to accept that they genuinely want to be together?’

  ‘What, and betray my mother, like Morag betrayed our friendship?’ She shook her head. ‘No. Never.’

  ‘Sally, it’s almost Christmas. A time for families to be together, to stand together, especially when we are a country at war. And besides . . .’ He paused and looked at her and there was something in that look – a mixture of sadness and pity – that ripped at her defences and made her want to cry out to him, ‘What about your loyalty to me and what we could have had? What about taking my side? What about understandi
ng me?’ But of course she didn’t; couldn’t when he had put himself so clearly on Morag’s side.

  She saw his chest rise and fall as he took a deep breath. Then he told her, ‘I was hoping that you would agree to see your father and Morag before I had to tell you this, but obviously you won’t. There’s to be a child, Sally, due in May. Your father and Morag desperately want you to share in their joy.’

  The room spun wildly round her, nausea clawing at her stomach, the sound of her vehement denial echoing inside her own head.

  Callum caught hold of her, his hands gripping her upper arms as she fought against the faintness threatening to overwhelm her.

  Above her she could see the once beloved face of the man she had hoped to spend the rest of her life with, a man she had thought so morally superior, so kind, so everything she could ever imagined wanting in a man and more; but who was now her enemy, and the pain inside her was so strong she thought it would break her apart.

  ‘Sally?’

  Was that yearning she could hear in his voice? If it was then it was a brother’s yearning for her to uphold a sister, not a man’s yearning for her love.

  Bitterly, she shrugged off his hold.

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more,’ she told him. ‘I don’t ever want to see you again, Callum, or them.’

  ‘Have you no message for your father, Sally? He loves you and misses you.’

  ‘Does he? Well, he will soon have another child to love in my place, won’t he?’

  She turned to the door and held it open, telling him, ‘I want you to leave, Callum.’

  Silently, his mouth grim, he collected his cap and walked past her to the front door where he paused to say, ‘I thought better of you, Sally, I really did.’

  ‘Maybe I thought better of you as well, Callum,’ was the only response she allowed herself to make as he opened the door and disappeared into the darkness beyond it.

  A child. Her father and Morag were to have a child. Revulsion filled her. Revulsion and anger, and pain. If things had been as they should, then it could have been her and Callum announcing the conception of their child this Christmas. Not only had her father and her once friend stolen her past and belief in the devotion of her parents to one another, like swans partnering for life; they had also stolen her future. She would never ever forgive them.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘So you’re not coming home for Christmas then?’

  Even as her mother asked the question, it was Edith she was watching, Dulcie thought resentfully as she observed her sister talking animatedly several yards away to a group of admirers, who had halted her progress across the crowded floor of their local working men’s club where she had been singing.

  Dulcie hadn’t wanted to come to listen to her sister and she certainly hadn’t wanted to listen to her mother praising her so dotingly for doing so, but she’d got caught out on Sunday after church when her mind had been on the previous evening and not what her mother had been saying to her, and too late she realised she’d agreed to join her family to listen to Edith’s debut as a professional singer.

  The club was a rectangular room with a bar occupying the full length of the wall at one end, apart from a door that led into a narrow passageway containing the ladies’. The gents’ was outside in the yard where the brewery loaded the beer barrels into the cellar. Behind the bar was a kitchen where volunteers, who sometimes included Dulcie’s mother, made up sandwiches sold at the bar under a glass cover. The distempered walls were stained with the cigarette smoke, which wreathed round the room, gradually rising toward the ceiling.

  Behind the bar, with its mirrored back and glass shelves, the club’s manager, overweight and sweating, was pulling pints whilst his wife and the barmaid washed glasses at the small sink.

  Dulcie hated the place as much as the rest of her family seemed to love it. It was where the whole neighbourhood came to celebrate weddings, births and deaths, after going through the formal church proceedings attendant upon such occasions.

  Since tonight was a ‘social’ night, which meant that the all-male membership was allowed to bring along their other halves and families, the place was packed, whole families, including grandparents, aunts and uncles, in some cases, crowded round the cheap shabby tables on equally cheap, shabby and mismatched chairs. A harsh light beamed down on the small stage, where Edith had performed, at the opposite end of the room to the bar. The whole place stank of stale beer, male sweat, and cheap cigarettes, Dulcie thought, fastidiously wrinkling her nose. A door in the middle of one of the long walls opened into the pool room – a holy of holies that women were not allowed to enter – and it was plain from a few all-women tables that some of the men had already taken advantage of that embargo to escape into it.

  ‘No,’ Dulcie answered her mother’s question.

  ‘Are you sure this landlady of yours wants you staying there over Christmas? It seems a rum do to me. You’d think she’d want her house to herself and not filled with lodgers. I know I would. Christmas is for being with your own folk.’

  Her mother’s words hit a nerve but Dulcie wasn’t going to let her see that. Olive had been very cool with her since the night Tilly had rebelled, and Dulcie knew that her landlady blamed her, even if she hadn’t said so. The truth was that hers was probably as welcome a presence at number 13 over Christmas as it would have been at her own home, Dulcie thought bitterly. Just as her mother would be fussing over Edith, so her landlady would be fussing over Agnes, making a big thing of her not having a family of her own. Not that Dulcie was going to tell her mother that.

  Dulcie tossed her head, her blonde curls caught back in a pretty diamanté bow-shaped hair clip that she’d managed to get reduced, after she’d discovered that it had been slightly damaged. Dropping it on the floor earlier in the week and deliberately twisting the clip so that it didn’t fasten properly had been easily done whilst Miss Timmins, whose eyesight wasn’t very good, and who was really supposed to be retired but who worked one day a week had been in charge of the hair ornaments counter. Poor old Timid Timmy, as they all called her, had looked confused and blinked desperately, her thin, veined hands trembling slightly as she tried to examine the faulty catch. She had been easy for Dulcie to manipulate, and the departmental floor manager when summoned had agreed that the clip could be reduced. He might have given Dulcie a sharp look as she had paid for her purchase but she had felt triumphant rather than guilty. Just like she had felt triumphant that Saturday night at Hammersmith Palais, knowing that David would rather be with her than with his stuck-up fiancée-to-be.

  Feeling triumphant was very important to Dulcie. It made her feel she was in her rightful place in the order of things.

  ‘Actually,’ she told her mother untruthfully, ‘my landlady asked me especially as a favour to her if I would stay there over Christmas.’

  ‘Oh, well, if she wants you there . . .’ her mother responded, using a tone of voice that suggested to Dulcie that her mother couldn’t understand why that should be the case. Immediately Dulcie’s combative spirit was aroused.

  ‘She does. She told me that she thinks of me as another daughter and that she doesn’t know how she’d manage without me there to give her Tilly a few words to the wise when it’s needed, me being older than Tilly and everything. Of course, I told her that I’m pleased to do my bit. Treats me ever so well, she does, just like I was her daughter really, always getting me little bits of treats.’ Warming to her deception, Dulcie started to embroider the fabrication she had created.

  ‘She took us all shopping to the Portobello Market the other week and she bought me ever such an expensive blouse, pure silk and French design, and—’

  ‘Oh, here comes Edith now.’

  The warmth for her younger daughter in her mother’s voice as she interrupted her infuriated Dulcie, causing her to say unkindly, ‘I don’t know where Edith got that dress from but she’s certainly not dressing anything like as well now that she hasn’t got my wardrobe to raid any
more. It doesn’t suit her at all.’

  ‘She looks lovely in it,’ Dulcie’s mother protested indignantly. ‘Pink always was Edith’s colour. I remember when she was born I had this lovely pink layette that I’d saved ever so hard for. The first new baby clothes I’d had. I had to make do with hand-me-downs for you and for Rick.’

  ‘Oh, Mum, I thought I was never going to get over to you, so many people wanted to stop and tell me how well I’d done,’ Edith enthused, laughing happily as she hugged her mother.

  ‘More like they couldn’t believe what you were wearing and wanted to get a closer look,’ Dulcie told her nastily, causing the smile to disappear from Edith’s flushed face as she turned back to their mother, looking tragic and upset.

  ‘Take no notice of Dulcie, love,’ their mother comforted Edith. ‘If you ask me, Dulcie, it’s just as well you aren’t coming home for Christmas, the way you’re always upsetting poor Edith.’

  ‘It’s just because she’s jealous, Mum, because I can sing and she can’t,’ Edith trumped Dulcie’s earlier insult.

  ‘Call that singing?’ Dulcie returned, not to be outdone. ‘It sounded more like someone was trying to kill a cat. And you missed that top note in your last song.’

  ‘No I didn’t.’

  ‘Yes you did.’

  ‘Dulcie, why do you always have to upset poor Edith?’ their mother demanded.

  ‘Why do you always have to take her side?’ Dulcie shot back, taunting her sister, ‘Mama’s little girl who can’t do any wrong.’

  ‘Here comes Frank, Mum. I’ll have to go. We’ve got to talk with the manager and the band leader about some future bookings,’ Edith announced, ignoring Dulcie as she jumped up hurriedly.

  Watching her sister walk away with the man who had swaggered up to them, a cigar stuck in his mouth, his thinning hair greased back from his beefy florid face, Dulcie asked, ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘His name’s Frank Lepardo, and he’s Edith’s agent,’ her mother told her with obvious pride. ‘He saw her singing the other week and went backstage to sign her up there and then, he was that pleased with her. He’s a real impresario and he reckons that Edith is going to be big – bigger than that Vera Lynn everyone raves about. He’s had one of the top ones from ENSA pleading with him to let Edith go on the wireless. Your sister is going to end up famous.’