A Liverpool Lass (41 page)

‘Not the fathers,’ Lilac said. ‘I’m not quite sure if I’ve got it right, but wouldn’t it be ... earlier ... ’

She felt her cheeks flame, but George, absorbed in calculation, merely grunted. He frowned down at his hands, then said: ‘The thing is, Lilac, it’s going to be impossible to find your father until we’ve got your mother. It’s difficult for a woman to hide a baby, but a man doesn’t look any different. So for now, let’s concentrate on the ladies. Right?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Lilac said, her cheeks still hot. ‘Did I tell you we’re going home the day after tomorrow? For definite this time.’

‘You didn’t tell me, but Grandfather told Grandmother that he’d be happy when Friday arrived, so I guessed what he meant. Well, he shan’t stop me from seeing you, I swear it! Another thing, I can always call in Rodney Street to find out how the pup is doing; it’s the spotted pup you’re taking, isn’t it?’

‘Yes; Petal. Mrs Matteson says we may call her Petal. I like it because it’s a flowery name, like Lilac.’

Petal was already the apple of her eye. Small and fat, white with liver spots, she was the prettiest of all the cocker spaniels in Lilac’s opinion. Although she did not want to go home, for she had never been happier than she was at Elcott Hall, she was reconciled to the move because it would mean being with Petal a great
deal and having the schooling of her. Mrs Matteson had made it clear that she would expect Lilac to undertake to housetrain Petal as well as teaching her good manners.

‘George, dear, where are you? Do come and have your tea.’

From the small group of people on the terrace, Mrs Matteson’s clear voice floated across the long green lawn.

Lilac stayed where she was and George, though he got sulkily to his feet, did not actually move but looked down at her imploringly.

‘Go on, George,’ Lilac said briskly. ‘There are crumpets. And an orange and ginger cake. I watched cooky making it and she let me add the candied peel. We’ll meet again later.’

1920

Nellie stood at the rail of the ship and watched the heaving grey ocean and hoped she would not disgrace herself. Truth to tell she had so looked forward to this moment and now that it had come it just seemed a huge anti-climax.

She could have gone back earlier, of course, had she been set on it. But once Lilac had moved out, it seemed only sensible to sub-let the house. It had taken a bit of time, Aunt Ada’s daughters as well as Nellie’s brothers had had to be consulted, but they all felt that the house would only deteriorate left to stand empty – unless a family desperate for accommodation simply moved in and took over.

So for a year a family of four had lived there, a woman and her wounded husband and their two small children. But then the husband had died and the wife, a native of Manchester, had gone home to her own people, leaving number eleven empty.

And the hospital in the chateau was only half full now, the patients were being moved whenever possible, either home or to other hospitals. The girls who remained were restless, prepared to face the possibility of unemployment at home rather than continue to live in a foreign land.

Lately, Nellie had dreamed of standing by the ship’s rail and seeing France get smaller, until it was just a smudge on the horizon. She had not expected to feel a traitor, as though by leaving France she was also leaving Lucy.

Lucy! It was a full year, now, since her friend had died, yet it sometimes seemed to Nellie as though Lucy influenced everything she did. Every dream of home had contained her friend, every wistfully imagined sailing had been with Lucy by her side. And when she had finally been told that she was to leave in so many days’ time, that Emma and Sarah and Maggie would be going home too, all she could think of was Lucy, left here alone.

She knew it was stupid, because Lucy wasn’t here any longer, hadn’t been here since that awful moment in Ward Five when her hoarse, painful breathing had stopped. There had been nothing of Lucy in her face two minutes later, so why should she imagine, now, that Lucy wailed, ghostlike, across the flat French countryside because her friends had left?

She was gripping the rail so tight that her knuckles had whitened and her hands felt as though they were frozen to the metal. She carefully unclenched her fingers and turned her head. Maggie stood by her. She, too, was straining back towards France. She saw Nellie looking at her and turned, sighing.

‘Nell, have you thought what we’re going to go back to? Nothing will be the same again, not now we’ve known freedom, responsibility, the thrill of being not just useful but important, a person who could help a man to live, or ease his dying. We’ve done our duty and more – it’s over a year since the war ended, we stayed whilst we were needed – but that won’t matter to the folk at home. How will I go back to living over a greengrocer’s shop, doing as my mother wishes, dusting the furniture in the mornings, embroidering pillowslips in the evenings? And why should I do it? Why the hell should I? What are my chances of marriage, now? In case you hadn’t realised, Nell, the pillowslips were to be my trousseau.’

‘And Ned was killed at the battle of the Somme,’ Nellie said. ‘But you must have met a hundred other young men, Maggie, and you’ll meet a hundred more. You’ll marry, I’m sure of it.’

‘Are you? Take a good look at me, Nell. A good look. When the war started I was twenty-one. I knew nothing, and you could see it on my face. Now I’m twenty-seven and look ten years older. I’ve worked until my nails were down to the quicks, I’ve scrubbed floors and shovelled coal into the boiler, I’ve changed dressings and cleaned suppurating wounds. I’ve laid out the dead and tried to ease the agony of the living. What have I got to offer some young man who’s longing to forget what he saw and suffered in the course of the war? Nightmares? Shared horrors? Believe me, Nell, the men who survive won’t want reminding of it by the woman in their bed, they’ll want to forget with ... with a dewy-eyed twenty-year-old who faints at the sight of blood and is proud of her filbert nails.’

Nellie looked at her companion, at the sensible, short-cropped hair, the lined face, the work-weary hands. Maggie was tired and looked it, but surely that would not make her unmarriageable? Surely someone would see, not the tiredness nor the cruel lines that sorrow had bitten into her face, but the courage, the gaiety in adversity, the indomitable spirit which had brought Maggie through?

She said as much. Maggie smiled wearily.

‘I wish you were right, but I don’t believe you are. Men who want to forget will look elsewhere for a bride and men who never suffered won’t want me as a continual reminder that they were the lucky ones. Still, I can’t face the flat over the greengrocer’s for the rest of my life, so I shall either continue to nurse if they’ll have
me, or I’ll try to start up a little business of my own – God knows what.’

‘You need money to start a business,’ Nellie said slowly. ‘And in one way we’re the same – I’ve got to go back to whatever awaits me, and pick up an ordinary life again. I don’t know how Stuart will feel when we meet again. But you and I will settle down, find our place in the world.’

Maggie smiled and turned to go down below and Nellie thought of her own circumstances. She had jumped at the chance to stay on for a further year once she knew from Lilac’s letters that she was happily settled. Nellie was grateful to the Mattesons, of course she was, but also, perhaps, the tiniest bit jealous. And ever since Lilac’s visit to Elcott Hall, Nellie had been worried by her changing attitude. She seemed to have got it into her head that she was descended from royalty, or at least from titled people, and all she ever wrote about was her Quest, as she called it. She had been fond of Art O’Brien, but that had fallen by the wayside when Lilac realised that he was powerless to help her find her parents whereas George Elcott could be very useful. And Nellie was sure, from the tone of Lilac’s missives, that she was hoping George would ask her to marry him.

Foolish child, Nellie thought fondly now, smiling to herself. As if he would be allowed to do so, even if he wanted marriage in four or five years’ time. But Lilac would grow up, as she, Nellie, had grown up, and see the error of wanting the impossible. If she stuck to her schooling and worked hard, then the world was her oyster, and with looks like hers ...

Thinking of Lilac’s future calmed Nellie’s agitation for a while, but then she thought of Stuart, who was with the Army of Occupation in Germany, reporting
on the war trials. He was learning the German language and getting on well with it and was now settled in Berlin as the correspondent for a national daily. Their close correspondence still went on, sometimes he talked longingly of meeting when they both went home ... but would it mean anything when they did see each other again? Would the magical warmth have withstood the long separation? And, naturally, she wondered sometimes whether she should have given herself to him, but then practical commonsense took over. He was a good man, he would not despise her for the pleasure they had given each other. She had read in his letters his longing for her and had told him frankly that she felt the same. No; that night in the big bed, clutching, holding, touching, learning, had been a gift from the gods and she had no intention of wishing it undone.

Nevertheless, doubts hovered, for she knew she had changed, as Maggie said. Lucy’s death had changed her, the suffering she had seen had made its imprint on her soul. But so would Stuart have changed; if she went home and Stuart followed, then she would soon know where she stood.

Alone? If Stuart had grown away from her with all his new responsibilities, then she might indeed be alone, for Lilac would probably want to move away from her in a couple of years. Dear God, was loneliness to be her reward for doing her duty?

Sighing, she turned back to the rail and gazed, this time, towards England.

They docked in London, and the girls who were Liverpool-bound got on a train which took them through a country they remembered vaguely from that other
journey, the one they had taken as innocent girls eager for a part in the war.

England looked green and pleasant in the spring sunshine, with flowers blooming, trees in bud, people beginning to wear lighter clothing as the warmth of the days increased. Nellie remembered France; they had been taken on a tour of the battlefields and the blackened emptiness of the landscape, without even a tree or a village, would haunt her until her dying day. She had walked over the lines with Maggie, Emma and the others, deeply depressed to think that she, as a member of the human race, must bear some responsibility for this sea of mud, this ruin of what had once been fair fields, pleasant places.

But now was the time for forgetting. She sat back in her seat, with Maggie’s side warm against hers. Maggie lived in Chester, they would part soon, but surely they would meet again? They had been so close this past year, since Lucy’s death. It seemed impossible that, tomorrow, there would be no Maggie to joke with, no Maggie from whom to ask advice.

The train jerked, slowed. A station loomed, grey and black, shut off from the green and gold of the countryside. It was a practical place, smelling of concrete, coal burning, the sulphurous reek of the steam. On the platform a man with a cart was selling hot bread rolls with sausages in. Maggie and Nellie bought one each. They ate with enjoyment, then sat back in their seats and gazed out of the window at the peaceful countryside as the train chugged on.

The train slowed again, clattering over points, and drew up alongside another grey platform. A porter, hat at an angle, a spotted scarf round his throat, announced that this was Chester. Nellie had been dreading this moment and now that it had arrived she saw that
Maggie dreaded it too. But they were practical women, no longer foolish girls. Nellie helped Maggie with her luggage and stopped on the platform long enough to give her friend a parting hug, to promise to write or to visit. But even as the train began to move and she waved from the window to the diminishing figure in the drooping grey cloak, Nellie was sure it would never happen; they would be swallowed up by their own lives once more the moment they stepped from the train.

It was too much to bear. She had not wept since Lucy’s funeral; now she wept all the way to Liverpool Lime Street.

She had not expected to be met because she had not been able to tell Lilac what train she was on. Nevertheless, it was awful arriving at Lime Street station to find nobody who knew her on the platform. And it was busy, too, crowded with people, a good few of them still in uniform, as she was. Demobilization had taken longer than anyone had anticipated; here it was, mid-March 1920, and there were still troops in Europe and probably further afield, too.

But Nellie picked up her heavy box and the lighter bag which she slung across her shoulders, and set off, suddenly eager to get away from the limbo world of the station, the bustle of arrivals and departures, and to emerge into the real, civilian world at last. Out there the sunny March day awaited her – and Liverpool, her home.

Nellie stumped out of the station, passing directly under the grimy windows of the North Western Hotel. Lime Street was very wide here and horses, carts, cars and lorries streamed by whilst Nellie waited for a
chance to cross. A tram approached, the driver clanking the bell warningly, then leaning out to shout at a lad who had skipped across the road in front of him. Nellie found the bustle confusing after so long in a land where military convoys were almost the only traffic on the road and paused by the kerb, blinking. Directly opposite her rose St. George’s Hall on its wide plain with the statues of the famous black against the pearl-grey stone building. Just to the left of that she could see the trees in St John’s Garden. Their branches were bare still, but big with buds. Pigeons, dusky black, fudge-brown, dove-grey, squabbled for crumbs which a nursemaid and her charge scattered round the equestrian statue’s plinth. Occasionally a passerby would cause the flock to rise into the air for a moment and then the wings flashed white and gold in the sunshine and the child would crow with delight, throwing back his head in its red tarn o’shanter and clapping at the sudden flurry.