After the War is Over (27 page)

‘I saw them with my own eyes,’ Susan Ramsey raged.

‘You can’t have done,’ Nell stammered. Quinn and Kevin could do many things, but they couldn’t have got out of the house on their own.

She was incapable of answering back or losing her temper, but she was deeply upset by the Ramseys’ attitude, which she considered unreasonable. She hoped that when Susan Ramsey became pregnant, she would have twins or even triplets.

‘Let’s see how she copes then,’ she would say to Red when he came home. Red got his own back by playing his fiddle and singing as loudly as he could, ignoring the furious knocking on the door when one of the Ramseys came to complain. Some days Eamon would drop round and they would play together. Eamon had lodgings in Seaforth. His landlady made him huge meals because she claimed he needed filling out a bit. She was also doing her utmost to seduce him.

The Finnegans were a popular couple on the little estate in Waterloo. In his own way, Red was a minor celebrity. Few people had heard of Flynn and Finnegan, but it was known that they travelled about the country entertaining miners and the like. Once they had actually appeared on television, though only to accompany a troupe of Irish dancers, and their records were on sale in town.

When Red came home, Nell would yelp with delight and fling her arms around him, and all four Finnegans would sit on the big settee kissing and cuddling till they got fed up and went their various ways.

In December 1955, Maggie sent a letter with the Christmas card made from a new photograph of her and Jack and their growing daughters.

Do you realise, Nell
, she wrote in her barely readable scrawl,
that it’s ten years since the three of us returned to Liverpool after the army. Just think how our lives have changed since then. Eight children between us, husbands for you and me, a lovely house each. It’s an awful pity that Iris and Tom have broken up. At least I think so. She hardly ever mentions him in her letters, and Rosie reports that Tom seems to live permanently in their old house in Rimrose Road. What’s more, there’s a woman living there too, though maybe she just rents the flat upstairs and people are spreading nasty gossip – me included!

It had started with Tom coming home late most nights, or sometimes staying overnight in Rimrose Road. When he did come home, he mumbled something about being overladen with work, being at his desk till all hours, bringing the filing up to date and all sorts of other excuses that Iris found difficult to believe – he’d never had to work late before.

Iris just mumbled something back. It was horrible to think the way she did, but the less she saw of him, the better. Now she had enough children, she no longer wanted to sleep with him, not even if he used a French letter or she one of those horrible rubber caps women were supposed to insert inside themselves. It was ages since she’d had pleasure from sex.

She had come to the unwelcome realisation that she no longer loved her husband, though she remained fond of him. It had taken her a long time to reach that conclusion. Since coming home, she had tolerated him and, in a way that she was very ashamed of, used him merely as a means of achieving a family.

Even when she discovered he was having an affair with Frances Blake, the receptionist who’d been there for years, she didn’t mind. In fact, she was glad. It meant he had a woman who had taken on Iris’s role as a wife, making her own behaviour seem less selfish.

He still turned up to take eight-year-old William out to museums, football matches, the pictures – they were both fans of Tarzan films.

‘Why don’t you ever take the girls with you?’ Iris once asked.

‘They squeal too much,’ he claimed.

And that was that.

In the Kaminski family, all was sweetness and light. Jack could not possibly have loved his girls more than he already did. Holly was the sweetest little thing, a real daddy’s girl, all sugar and spice and able to twist Jack around her little white finger with her captivating smile.

Maggie was also her elder daughter’s willing slave. At seven, Holly was the prettiest girl in her class, if not the entire school. She had her father’s fair hair and the same steady blue eyes.

‘You spoil her,’ people remarked from time to time, in particular Rosie when the Kaminskis went on their yearly visit to Liverpool, staying in one of the best hotels.

‘We love her,’ Maggie would say simply. ‘Too much love can’t possibly spoil a child.’

It was a statement with which Rosie couldn’t disagree. ‘Poor Grace must feel neglected,’ she said once.

‘Grace hates to be made a fuss of,’ Maggie would say confidently. She regarded herself as a perfect mother to her perfect children, as well as a perfect wife to Jack.

Grace was possibly too independent for her own good. She insisted on tying her own shoelaces from an early age, resulting in several nasty falls when they came loose.

‘Don’t help me,’ she would snap when Maggie went to put on her coat or cut up the food on her plate. Her features were too strong to be classed as pretty; more striking. She had Maggie’s black curls and blue eyes with a touch of lilac. Jack admired her enormously, calling her his ‘little brick’, which was how Greek generals referred to their heroic soldiers, he maintained. Even when she was very young, she refused to sit on his – or anybody’s – knee, though she condescended to listen to the stories that he told, sitting sternly beside him on the settee, while Holly curled up in his arms, the adoring daughter.

If Jack had a fault, it was a minor one. He was intent on tracking down his relatives who had disappeared from Poland during the war, a task that took up many hours of his time – too many as far as Maggie was concerned. He would sit well into the night in the dining room, only used to eat in at weekends, and which he regarded as his study, the table covered with papers. They had been married a few years before Maggie realised that the Kaminskis had been a rich, highly respected family in the small town in Poland where Jack was born. They had owned acres of forests and farming land as well as dozens of cottages.

The Polish set in London that Jack was part of had in the main been servants or neighbours of his family. Some of these people were also trying to find family members who had disappeared. They could well be dead, but it was not certain.

Letters often arrived at the Kaminski house from countries all over the world, though mainly from the United States, addressed to Jacek Kaminski. The envelopes contained many sheets of paper full of strange handwriting, rarely in English. Phone calls would come at all times of the day, providing bits of information as to where a certain person might be.

‘Who are you trying to find?’ Maggie had asked more than once. She knew his parents were dead, and his sister was married and living in Russian-occupied Poland. They had no idea when they would see each other.

‘Cousins,’ Jack would answer vaguely. ‘Aunts and uncles, friends.’

Maggie hoped that one day soon he would discover relatives living in America, and that she, Jack and the girls could cross the Atlantic in one of the big liners and visit them.

The Finnegan brothers were ear-achingly loud, they laughed too much, were too darned happy, couldn’t keep still, and were too clever by half. Aged five and six, they didn’t exactly terrorise the school, had never bullied a soul, yet they just seemed to dominate the place. When a Finnegan laughed, it could be heard in every corner.

Everyone felt sorry for the mother. She seemed such a nice quiet woman, who didn’t deserve to have two such rowdy lads. And their dad was that singer chap who could occasionally be seen on telly playing the fiddle and singing Irish songs.

‘I suppose that explains it,’ some people said. ‘The kids are Irish.’

Nell would have been upset had she known that people felt sympathy for her. As far as she was concerned, she was mother to two exceptional little boys who were the most popular in the school – with the other pupils, that is, if not their parents and the teachers. Scarcely a week would pass without them being invited to a birthday party somewhere in Waterloo. The party might turn into chaos, but the young guests would have a good time, having battled with Red Indians or won the war a second time under the leadership of General Quinn or King Kev Finnegan. Quinn could do a perfect imitation of Winston Churchill making a speech while smoking a big cigar, and Kev could stand on his head and do the splits upside down.

One Monday, Red came home after a tour of concerts in Yorkshire.

‘I’ve written you a song – or I should say I’ve written a song about you,’ Red said in between kisses. ‘I sang it twice, and each time I was asked for an encore. It’s called “Ode to Nell”.’

‘Sing it to me,’ a dazzled Nell requested. She’d like to bet she was the only woman in Liverpool whose husband had written a song for her.

Nell
, sang Red, looking at her adoringly,
my darling Nell
,

When you smile, a bell chimes in my heart
.

In my heart
.

Nell, my dearest Nell

If you should leave, hot tears will blind my eyes
.

My eyes
.

You are the light of my life
,

And I want you for my wife
.

Oh Nell, my sweet Nell
,

Please be mine
.

‘That’s lovely, Red. I’m flattered beyond belief.’ Nell burst out laughing and they collapsed together on to the settee. ‘I really love my song.’

‘It still needs a bit of polishing,’ Red said modestly. ‘But I expect the record to come top of the charts one day soon.’

He sang the song to the lads when they came home from school, and they sang it to their mother, then gave an exhibition of Irish dancing that they’d been taught that afternoon. (The Ramseys next door now had two children of their own and had stopped complaining.)

The memory of that very ordinary Monday, the day when her husband first sang her song and her children danced for her, would remain at the forefront of Nell’s mind throughout her life. Even when she was an old, old woman, she would smile as she remembered her little boys in their jerseys and shorts dancing in unison, lifting their scarred knees, shoulders back, hands on hips, solemn expressions on their tough little faces, red hair bouncing – they took after their da in that respect – while Red played the fiddle like a madman.

When they finished, Nell was moved to tears, as if she was aware that she had just experienced a remarkable event.

Seeing the tears that they’d never known their normally happy ma shed before, the lads launched themselves upon her, stroking her cheeks, kissing her ears, patting her head.

‘Don’t cry, Ma,’ Quinn ordered.

‘We’ll kiss you better, Ma,’ Kev offered.

‘But I’m all right.’ Nell tried to laugh, but the boys were stuck to her like limpets and it only made her cry more.

‘Your ma’s okay, lads.’ Red attempted to lift the boys off, but they refused to let go until Nell promised never to cry again.

‘Not for as long as I live,’ Nell vowed, though she thought that most unlikely.

Some weeks later, ‘Ode to Nell’ reached number twenty-eight in the charts. The following week it went down and continued to do so. Red was disappointed, but Nell didn’t care. It was
her
song, nobody else’s, and would always be number one as far as she was concerned.

In March of 1959, Jack received an extra-thick letter from Boston in the United States. Maggie was fast asleep by the time he came to bed on the day it arrived after spending the entire evening in his study.

‘You must have read it a dozen times,’ she remarked next morning as they were having breakfast. The girls weren’t due to come down for another half-hour.

‘I think I might well have done,’ Jack said gravely.

‘Did it contain lots of new information?’

‘It did indeed.’ He nodded. ‘I might be late home tonight. I’ve arranged to see a few people at the Red Pepper.’ This was the restaurant in Soho owned by Drugi’s uncle that the Polish contingent, as Maggie thought of them, used as a meeting place.

‘What time do you think you’ll be back?’

‘I don’t know, darling.’ He looked at her absently. Maggie went cold, realising that this was the first time in their relationship that he wasn’t concentrating wholly on either her or their daughters. Right now, he had other things on his mind, and it rather upset her. He blinked, as if suddenly remembering she was there. ‘Don’t do me a meal,’ he said. ‘I’ll eat at the restaurant.’

It was ten o’clock when he arrived home. He’d brought her flowers; daffodils, that were merely hard green buds. It would be a while before the yellow petals appeared.

‘Thank you,’ she said, trying to sound grateful – she couldn’t have explained why she wasn’t. It was as if a little cloud had appeared in their lives, a ridiculous thing to think when all he’d done was get a letter from America, something that had happened loads of times before.

‘I might go away for a while,’ he said when they were in bed.

‘To America?’ she enquired.

‘Yes, Washington. I need to see people.’

‘Is it an aunt or an uncle who’s been found?’ Perhaps it was a cousin.

‘No one’s been found, not exactly. It’s more information as to where someone might be. I need to go myself to make sure.’

Maggie could tell he wouldn’t countenance taking her and the children with him. She decided not to make a fool of herself by asking.

‘Good night, darling,’ he said, turning over.

Maggie went cold again.
He hadn’t kissed her good night!
It wasn’t deliberate, she could tell that; it was merely because he’d forgotten, which was much, much worse. ‘Who’s the someone you’ve had information about?’ she asked in a loud voice.

But Jack didn’t reply. He was fast asleep. Or pretending to be.

A few days later, he came home and announced that he was flying to America at the weekend.

‘How long will you be away?’ Maggie asked. She did her best not to sound bad-tempered.

‘I’ve arranged with the bank to take a month’s leave, though I may not need that much.’

‘A month!’ How could he think of leaving his family for an entire month?