Always in My Heart (11 page)

Cordelia had listened while Ron regaled everyone over supper with how Harvey had sniffed out Jim cowering naked behind the wall, but, unlike the others, she really didn’t think it was at all funny. Poor Jim was lucky to be alive, and she could only imagine the awful humiliation he must have suffered to be found like that – and to have his father actually joke about it. She was just thankful that only his pride
had been hurt and that his injuries hadn’t been more serious.

Jim had done his best to make light of it all during supper, but Cordelia could tell that he was worried about his future – as was Peggy. The last thing dear Peggy needed was for him to be called up, what with the baby, the air raids, and this big house to run.

Feeling tired and a little out of sorts, Cordelia had left the kitchen shortly after the nine o’clock news, and made her way up to her bedroom. It had been a long, rather fraught day, and although it had been heartening to hear the news that the Russians actually had the Germans in retreat from Moscow, the situation in the Far East was very worrying.

Once she’d prepared for bed, Cordelia rummaged in the bottom of her wardrobe and drew out the cardboard box she’d placed there the day she’d arrived at Beach View. Snug in her dressing gown and slippers, she sat in the chair by the gas fire in her room and, after a momentary hesitation, lifted the lid.

Her gaze fell on the bundle of letters tied together with a blue ribbon. The ink was faded, and the paper had become brittle as she’d read and re-read them during the years when her darling husband had been fighting in the trenches. She set them aside, not needing to read them again, for she knew them almost by heart, and his return home had wiped away the fear and made it all seem rather unreal.

The second bundle of letters was much thinner, and she’d tied a narrow black ribbon around them. These
few letters had been sent by her brother, Clive – again from the trenches. She had no wish to go through them, for they invoked such sad memories of a brother she’d adored and lost.

Cordelia set them to one side and sifted through the sepia photographs, pausing now and again to study the faces, and the fleeting moments in their lives that had been captured in perpetuity. Most of them were stiffly formal studio shots, and she gave a wry smile as she regarded the one of her parents.

Her mother was seated in an ornate chair, her long skirts carefully draped at her feet, her wide-brimmed hat tilted fetchingly as Cordelia’s father stood behind her, one hand on her shoulder, the other grasping his jacket lapel. They looked terribly grand and prosperous, and her father’s moustache fairly bristled with pride as he stared almost defiantly at the camera.

She set the photograph aside and continued to delve through the mementos. There were little hand-made birthday cards and crayon drawings given to her by her sons when they were still small, and a few short letters and hastily scrawled postcards that had been sent from Canada which hardly gave her any flavour of what their lives were like now. With a deep sigh, she continued to sort through the rest, and finally found what she was looking for.

Her oldest brother had been a good letter-writer, and she’d found these few amongst her parents’ things after they’d died. The sequence wasn’t complete, for
many of them had been lost or destroyed over the years, but they still told an interesting story, and she could remember, as a child, asking her father for the stamps to add to her collection.

Charles Fuller had married seventeen-year-old Morag Campbell after meeting her in her parents’ hotel whilst on a walking tour in Scotland. At twenty-five he’d decided he no longer wanted to be a small-town solicitor like his father and, as Morag was quite an adventurous sort of girl, they had upped sticks and sailed off to Malaya, where he became a well-paid legal advisor to the rich tea and rubber planters and the British expatriates.

But it appeared that life wasn’t perfect for this ambitious couple, for Morag had suffered several miscarriages, and they both despaired of ever having a child. When she eventually became pregnant again, Charles was already in his mid-forties and immersed in his flourishing legal practice, so she had left him in Malaya and gone home to Scotland in the hope that this time she would go full-term.

Their son, John Angus Charles Fuller, was delivered safely in the cottage hospital overlooking Loch Leven, and eight months later he travelled with his mother back to Kuala Lumpur. Charles’ later letters were full of his son ‘Jock’, and there were grainy photographs of the little family taking tea beneath palm trees, sitting on beaches beneath vast white umbrellas, and attending race meetings in their finery. Life, it seemed, was complete, and they lived like royalty in a big house
that overlooked the Strait of Malacca, waited upon by numerous native servants.

Cordelia flicked through the photographs. Charles had grown fat in his later years, but Morag retained her girlish figure, and their son thrived to become a stocky, well-built, handsome young man. But Morag’s sudden death from some dreadful tropical fever had changed everything.

There was only one more letter from that time, and it had arrived long after both their parents were dead. It was a rather sad postscript to the hopes and dreams that Charles and Morag had shared in the tropical heat of Malaya, for Charles had written that Jock had no yearning to be a lawyer, and had taken a lowly post as an apprentice rubber plantation manager. Charles had consequently lost heart in the practice and was planning to retire to a bungalow in Singapore.

Cordelia had written back, but she’d received no reply – and a few short years later the postman had delivered a black-edged envelope to the family home in Havelock Road. The card inside had been a formal notice of Charles’ death. There had been no letter to accompany this announcement, no address to which she could reply – and no explanation as to how he’d died. But from the tone of Charles’ last letter, she could only surmise that he’d found it impossible to carry on without his beloved Morag.

Cordelia sat with the card in her hand as the gas fire popped and hissed in the grate. There had been so few clues in those letters, and as Charles had died some
years ago, there was no way of knowing if his son, Jock, was still in Malaya.

She looked at the envelope and the rather gaudy stamp attached to it. He’d still been there in 1924, and by her reckoning, must now be in his mid-forties. Did he have a family? Was he still working on a rubber plantation? Or had he since left Malaya for some other exotic-sounding place?

She put the card back into the envelope, replaced everything in the box and closed the lid. It was all very confusing, and she felt rather foolish to be suddenly concerned about Charles’ son. Her brother had been a stranger, his son merely a smiling face in a photograph – but no matter how distant or estranged he might be, Jock was family, and she could only pray that he was somewhere safe, far from the Japanese invaders.

The girls had gone out, Mrs Finch and Peggy were in bed, and Jim had followed Rita’s advice and gone down to the fire station to see if there were any jobs to be had.

Ron had scrubbed himself clean in the scullery sink before donning his best suit, shirt and tie. Now he placed the dark blue scarf around his neck, eyed his reflection in the mirror above the dresser in the kitchen and winked. ‘To be sure, you still have it, Ronan Reilly. Handsome divil that you are.’

Ron had taken extra care this evening, for he knew it was important that Rosie could see that he meant
business. With his hair brushed, chin shaved and best shoes shined to a gleam, he was almost ready to leave for the Anchor. There was just one more thing to complete the look, but it would mean borrowing it from Jim, and as he’d spent the evening ribbing him, he doubted his son would lend him anything.

He eyed Harvey, who was watching him from the rug in front of the range – no doubt expecting a last walk. ‘Not tonight,’ murmured Ron. ‘You’re to stay and look after everyone.’

Harvey thumped his tail, gave a great yawn and sprawled happily back in the glow from the range.

Ron closed the kitchen door behind him and hurried down the concrete steps to the cellar. The scullery was by the back door which led into the garden, and consisted of the large copper boiler, a stone sink and a heavy mangle. The rest of the cellar had been divided into two bedrooms, and he walked past his own to the second where Jim would stay until Peggy let him back into their bed.

Glancing over his shoulder, and alert for the sound of Jim’s footsteps on the kitchen floor above him, Ron opened the door and turned on the light.

It was a fairly large room with a window that looked out onto a very narrow strip of earth which ran between the house and the front garden wall and under the short flight of steps that led from the pavement to the front door. This was where his grandsons Bob and Charlie had slept before they’d been evacuated to Somerset. Ron missed their noisy chatter, but he
wasn’t here to go down memory lane – he was here for a specific reason.

Looking round the cluttered room, he eventually found what he was searching for. The grey fedora wasn’t new, but Jim had kept it in excellent condition, and Ron carefully placed it on his head before hastily leaving the cellar and hurrying down the garden path to the gate. There would be ructions if Jim spotted it was missing, but he had the feeling his son was feeling too sorry for himself to even notice.

It was a cold night, and he was glad of the warm scarf as he strode along the twitten and crossed the street which ran up the hill from the seafront. All was quiet as he walked confidently down Camden Road in the pitch dark, yet he had to admit silently that he was feeling a little nervous. What if Rosie refused to talk to him? Or what if she did talk, and the things she said meant that it was over between them? It didn’t bear thinking about.

Ron hesitated outside the Anchor’s sturdy door, his hand hovering over the heavy iron latch. He could hear someone playing the out-of-tune piano and the accompanying chorus of off-key singers as they massacred Vera Lynn’s lovely song, ‘We’ll Meet Again’. Almost too afraid to face Rosie, he was on the point of turning away, but then he berated himself for being such a fool. He’d survived the trenches and getting shot in the arse by the Huns – what harm could a five-foot-two blonde do him?

He lifted the latch and went down the single step
and into the fug of cigarette smoke, spilled beer and the press of too many people in a small room with low ceilings. He raised his hat to two young girls as he pushed past them and through the crush to the equally crowded bar, where he eagerly sought the first sight of his darling Rosie.

But there was no sign of her – just the two middle-aged women she’d taken on part-time. He stood there waiting for one of them to finish serving so he could ask if Rosie was upstairs, or if she was unwell – it was most unusual for her not to be in the bar at this time of night. Then the thought struck him that she might be out – with someone else – and he felt a terrible clench about his heart.

Ron anxiously willed Brenda to hurry up and finish serving the man further along so he could talk to her. Then he heard the latch on the door behind the bar and looked eagerly towards it, expecting to see the lovely Rosie come sashaying in, in her frilly blouse and neat black skirt and high-heeled shoes.

But it wasn’t Rosie who came into the bar, and Ron stiffened with shock.

‘Well, well,’ said Tommy Findlay with a smirk. ‘It’s my old mate, Ron. What can I get you? Pot of bitter, isn’t it?’

Ron eyed the expensive sports jacket and neatly pressed twill trousers, the oiled hair and flaring moustache, and the bright blue eyes that missed nothing. ‘What are
you
doing here?’ he growled.

Tommy winked as he pulled on the beer pump.
‘That would be telling, Ron, and if you don’t mind me saying, it’s not really any of your business, is it?’ He set the pewter pot on the bar. ‘That’s eightpence ha’penny to you, Ron.’

Ron eyed the smeary pot and the short measure with a grimace. ‘I’ll have a full measure in a clean pot for me money,’ he rumbled. ‘Where’s Rosie?’

Tommy grudgingly poured the beer into a cleaner pot and topped it up before placing it too firmly back on the bar. ‘Rosie’s away for a while,’ he said, the smirk returning. ‘I don’t reckon she’ll be back before Christmas, so if you don’t approve of the beer or the way it’s served, I suggest you drink in another pub.’

‘Where’s she gone?’ Ron asked anxiously.

Tommy wiped the spill with a cloth and leaned forward, his voice low beneath the hubbub of surrounding chatter. ‘She’s where she should have been instead of down here serving the likes of you,’ he said, his blue eyes like narrow shards of flint. ‘The pub will probably be sold, ’cos she won’t be able to look after her husband and this place.’

Ron stared at him in confusion. ‘But her husband’s in St Mary’s hospital,’ he breathed.

‘Not any more,’ replied Tommy with a malign grin. ‘Never mind, Ron. I’ll send your regards next time I write to her.’

Ron turned his back on him and pushed through the crush until he reached the pavement. Gulping in the cold air, he had to lean against a lamp post for a few minutes before he could find the strength to walk. ‘Oh,
Rosie,’ he breathed. ‘My darling Rosie. Why did you not tell me? I would have understood.’

As the bell clanged for last orders, Ron pushed away from the lamp post and staggered back to Beach View. She had gone – without a word or a backward glance. Had she ever really loved him, or had he simply been an old fool to believe that she ever could? He would probably never get the chance to ask her now.

Two weeks had passed since the Japanese had first landed in Malaya, and the horrifying news that both the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
had been sunk by Japanese torpedo bombers had left everyone reeling. This disaster was followed by the appalling realisation that now that they had no battleships to safeguard the peninsula, and their air force had been all but wiped out in the enemy air raids, Malaya had only the land-based Army to beat back the invaders. And those Allied forces were mostly fresh-faced recruits with no experience of war, let alone fighting in swamps and jungles.