Birmingham Friends (25 page)

Lisa put her head on one side. ‘Who was that bloke I saw at your dad’s funeral? The one with the gammy leg. I was watching ’im – ’andsome, isn’t ’e? ’Ardly took his eyes off you all afternoon.’

‘Oh, that’s just Douglas,’ I said.

‘That’s just Douglas,’ Lisa mimicked me, her spirits returned. ‘Come on Kate – ’e’d put bonfire night in the shade the flame ’e’s got lit for you.’ She leaned towards me. ‘ ’Asn’t ’e?’ I knew Lisa took pride in her directness, her knowing that she could make me open up.

I nodded. ‘I suppose he has.’

‘And what about you?’

‘I’ve been trying not to have.’

Throughout the previous months Douglas and I had grown closer, though the progression was awkward. He apologized repeatedly for his behaviour after Daddy’s funeral, and since then had been only charming and good-natured. We had very little physical contact, and though Douglas was very tender towards me, he behaved with nothing but restraint and tact. I was the problem, confused and guilty as I was about Angus. But Douglas was very patient and he had a gift for making you confide in him. I poured out my feelings about Angus.

One day when I was telling him about our childhood he said, ‘You’d known him since you were quite small then?’

‘Oh, yes. The Harveys moved in when I was seven. I thought I’d told you?’

‘I see,’ Douglas said, as if he had suddenly got to grips with something. ‘So he was really a childhood friend?’

‘Well – yes,’ I said, puzzled. ‘We’d obviously known each other a long time.’

Since the afternoon of the funeral he had not tried to kiss me. Sometimes the way he looked at me I thought he was about to, but he held back. The only exceptions to this were times when I cried. He held me then, with a gentleness which touched me. I didn’t know whether I wanted more. I didn’t encourage it. It would have made me feel disloyal to Angus. I felt safe with Douglas, restored by his sheer physical presence near me, and knowing that he was not going to be sent away. And increasingly I knew how attractive I found him. But I resisted showing too much affection. It would have been unfair to him.

Gradually, Douglas began to tell me about his own family. Evidently he did not find them an easy subject to discuss.

‘I wanted to get a long way away from them,’ he said. We were sitting by the lake in Cannon Hill Park, wrapped in coats and scarves. ‘That’s why I came to look for a job up here. Birmingham’s not a place they’d be all that keen to visit.’

‘Not even to see you?’

‘No. My father’s in the Home Guard now. He’s a schoolmaster in civvy street. It should suit him. Used to giving orders.’

‘And your mother?’

‘A waxwork.’ He stared at the grey sky. Straight-necked mallards whirred above us. ‘Actually, more of a plaster saint. Never talks back to the Colonel. He never was a colonel, by the way, but that’s the way he behaves at home. I had to get away – it was stifling. I couldn’t breathe in that house. My mother wanted to wrap me in lint and keep me there, muzzled, because of my leg. She tried to do that pretty much all through my childhood. I had to prove to myself that I had a brain even if my leg was a joke. I loved writing and I wanted to do something active, not be some dried-up academic. They didn’t even send me to school, you see – because of the way I looked. I suppose they were worried about me being teased – I’d be no good at games and so on. So my father taught me when he had time, and I had a man who came to the house. Mr Lovely his name was – ’ Douglas chuckled. ‘Not a bad sort. Actually it was his idea that I look for a job on a paper.’

‘How very grim,’ I said. ‘It must have been so lonely.’

‘I lived through it,’ he said lightly.

Sometimes I sensed Douglas wanted to touch me, or kiss me. I found him watching me with a kind of hunger in his face. He would look away quickly when our eyes met. I often wished he could just hold me and that I could respond without fear or guilt, that it could all be more simple.

‘Go on,’ Lisa urged me. ‘You can tell me. You’ve fallen for him, haven’t you, Kate?’

‘Maybe – a bit,’ I admitted.

‘So what’s wrong with that?’

‘I’m afraid I’ll allow myself this – that I’ll let my feelings for him grow and then suddenly one day Angus will come home and I’ll have hurt everyone. It would be terrible. What I really wish is that he’d come back and things could be as they were before.’

‘They’ll never be that,’ Lisa said drily. ‘Never are, are they? You said ’e was dead.’

‘He almost certainly is. The latest from the Red Cross is that he was shot down over the sea. I know there’s no real hope.’

‘And you reckon this other feller’s worth it?’

I hesitated so that Lisa put her head on one side quizzically. ‘Yes – I think so.’

‘There you are, then.’

When I left Lisa’s that evening the fog had intensified, and hung dark and choking along the streets. Even though the road was no longer completely blacked out, it was very hard to see anything. I clicked on my ineffective cycle lamp and decided I would be safer walking until I reached the main road where the kerbs were painted in black and white stripes to make them easier to see. I set off up Stanley Street. Muffled figures passed me in the fog, a few saying ‘Evening’ as they faded out of view again. After a while I decided I’d be better off without the lamp as it seemed only to reflect off the fog.

The man approached me almost silently and I ran my bike straight into him.

‘Christ,’ the voice said furiously. He bent down, rubbing his leg. I think the wheel nut must have caught his shin. ‘For heaven’s sake, if you can’t ride the thing, at least walk it along the kerb so you don’t do anyone else an injury.’

He had his collar turned up against the damp air and his face was in shadow, but I knew that voice immediately. Not wanting him to recognize me, I murmured ‘Sorry’ and quickly wheeled past him, my heart pounding.

‘I should damn well think so!’ he shouted after me.

I wanted to get away from him as fast as I could. As I pressed on up the street I had a strong, horrible instinct as to what he was doing there. Kemp’s stood among a collection of factories several streets away. Alec Kemp always travelled there by car, and Stanley Street was not, by any stretch of the imagination, on his way home.

At dawn it was quiet, except for the dripping trees. And then the bells: church bells so long silent, the sound of them ringing across the city all the more jubilant when unheard for so long. 8 May 1945. In the night there had been a storm, thunder and lightning like the nudge of something supernatural, ending the war just as they had begun it.

The day before we had spent waiting, confused. In the morning there was a news blackout and it wasn’t until three in the afternoon that they announced Germany’s surrender. War in Europe was over.

I went to church that morning with Mummy and Gladys and the children. The building was packed and they were promising to put on extra services. Between us we kept the children amused and reasonably still.

‘Now thank we all our God.’ Gladys’s clear voice rose and fell beside me as it had when she was scrubbing our floors. I knew, sadly, that she wouldn’t be with us much longer. During the prayers Mummy knelt with her eyes closed. I assumed she was thinking of Daddy and giving thanks that William would be coming home safely. But thoughts of what we had lost came more forcefully to me. I tried to bring Angus’s face before me, feeling panic and shame when I could barely picture him.

‘Whatever’s happened to you, I love you,’ I told him silently. ‘If you are alive, come back to me, please, my darling. And if you’re not, rest peacefully knowing I’ll love you always. Always.’

Many of us were in tears, especially when we stood to sing the last hymn, ‘Jerusalem’, the combination of joy and loss too much for us.

Afterwards, everyone was on the street, hugging, shaking hands. There was a dazed look to people, euphoria and disbelief combined with a residual irritation at the confused way in which the news of the final surrender had been relayed to us. ‘They could at least have let us know what was happening . . .’ But now it didn’t matter. It was over.

I went through the motions of greeting the neighbours, of laughing and exclaiming, but all the time I wanted desperately to be alone. My thoughts during the service had been so close to Angus, and this had left a knot of tension tightening in me like a physical ache.

It was a showery day, the sky busy with cloud. I just wanted to walk and walk and have time to think by myself.

‘Where are you going?’ Mummy called after me as I took off along the road with my umbrella.

‘I’m just going to have a look round for a bit,’ I called back over my shoulder.

‘But that nice Mr Craven said he’d come round to the house . . .’ Gladys’s voice wafted to me along the pavement.

I knew this perfectly well, and it was another reason I had to take off. I turned and waved vaguely as if I hadn’t heard properly, calling, ‘Back soon!’ I knew Mummy and Gladys would be all right together listening to all that was going on on the wireless.

Without really deciding where to go I turned automatically towards the centre of Birmingham, walking fast, needing to let off steam and exhaust myself. As I did so I looked down the side streets and could see all the hurried preparations going on for street parties, the trestle tables draped with sheets and people bustling around, some already wearing coloured paper hats. Miles of bunting was going up, rippling above the tables in the side streets, and Union Jacks brightened the grimy fronts of the houses, and everywhere movement of people, shouting, laughing.

Down one street in Balsall Heath a pair of trousers adorned the middle of one of the lines of bunting. I found myself smiling as I heard Douglas’s voice in my head: ‘Still hanging out the washing on the Siegfried Line!’ and I was startled by the way I was becoming used to his jokes, to him.

It started raining and I put up my umbrella, but the rain didn’t chase anyone from the streets for long. I walked down into our battered city, hearing bursts of cheering and bands playing as I moved into the crowded streets in the heart of Birmingham. I felt a rush of loneliness at being there alone on this day, but at the same time it was fitting. It was a day of turmoil for everyone, in its way, and I could not have stood company just then, such was the tension of mixed feelings inside me. But I wanted to be out here amid the frenzied activity of the city, to be part of it on a day when we all stood poised on the rim of the future. I suppose here in all this communal uncertainty I was longing to find the way to orientate myself in my own life. To work out what direction I should take next.

Around me pasty, tired faces smiled along the streets, chattered and shrieked with excitement under the ripple of flags. People were breaking into singing and dancing. A group of women cavorted across New Street with their arms linked singing ‘Knees up Mother Brown’ and pushing their legs up high, and I heard ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ clashing with it from further down the road, and whistles and cheers and shouts of laughter.

I made my way slowly towards Victoria Square, smelling the wet pavement mingled with cigarette smoke. People were shouting at each other, someone’s voice behind me, ‘Edna – Edna – over ’ere!’ and a woman with curlers round her head, not caring. Dare-devils in uniform and out of it scrambled up lamp-posts and on to high window-sills and stood laughing and waving: another group, some of whom were still dressed for the Land Army, sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ with their arms round each other. Worries were put aside, everyone throwing themselves into this uplifting, long, long-awaited morning. This was enough: today. I saw a few people crying and Churchill’s words, relayed to us through loudspeakers in the streets, moved more people to tears: ‘God bless you all. This is your victory. It is the victory of the cause of freedom in every land . . .’

I didn’t cry, not then. But perversely, after such a strong impulse to be alone, what I did feel was an overpowering need to turn to someone close to me to share these moments. Angus. And he wasn’t there. He never would be. Standing amid the jostling crowd and seeing this glimpse of what might have been gave me my most extreme moments of distilled pain in all the time since Angus was reported missing. I felt a physical sensation like an incision, too sharp and deep for tears. Yet once I had passed through it it left me lightened and relieved as if I had wept for a long time.

I bought a cup of tea from a mobile canteen on the street and stood quietly sipping it next to a lamp-post, hands tight round the enamel cup, soothed and easier in myself.

‘Awright, love?’ a gravelly voice asked next to me. A dapper man with a thin black moustache like Peter Lorre. ‘What a day, eh?’

I smiled. ‘Yes, isn’t it?’

There was something in the man’s stance and chirpy way of talking that Douglas would have loved to mimic, and I would have liked to see him do it. I stored the encounter in my mind as something to tell him. After handing the cup back I eased my way out of the crowds, away from the centre of the city, and began to walk home.

I experienced a sense of anticlimax, yet also of understanding. It was over – for us. I’d never imagined it like this, with war still raging on the other side of the world. It thought this day, when it came, would be a key to something. Angus would come home, somehow decisions would be made for me. But if the Red Cross were right, Angus lay in a sea grave. He was not missing. Not a Prisoner of War. Angus was dead. I had to accept the truth of that. I had to turn and carry on with the living.

Douglas didn’t arrive at our house until late afternoon, so I hadn’t been much missed.

‘They gave me the rest of the afternoon off,’ he told us. ‘So I came round straight away.’

Gladys, charmed by him, actually simpered. She thought Douglas wonderful. ‘It’s a pity about his, well, you know, his leg,’ she’d say. ‘But he’s ever so handsome, isn’t he?’

Douglas was looking very spruce. Smart clothes were important to him, and I often teased him, saying he didn’t look seedy enough to be a reporter. His camera was, as ever, slung over one shoulder.