Chocolate Girls (52 page)

‘Ede? You still live ’ere then?’

The eyes began to look familiar then, the shape of the face despite the extra padding on it. But it was only the voice she truly recognized.

‘Ruby?’ Even then Edie wasn’t completely sure. ‘Cocoa? Oh my goodness, Ruby – is that you?’ She couldn’t begin to hide how appalled she was by the sight of her as she stood nodding, shamefacedly. ‘What in heaven’s name’s happened to you?’

‘Can I come in?’

‘Don’t be daft, of
course
you can!’ She led her through to the back. ‘Frances – I’ve got a surprise for you. Ruby’s here.’

‘Ruby?’ The struggle was visible on Frances’s face as she tried to put together the memory of the brightly dressed, ebullient Ruby whom they had last seen when she left for America with the person standing in front of her now. ‘How lovely to see you dear! Do take your coat off and sit down.’

Peeling off her coat, Ruby revealed a loose, unflattering dress in a floral material. It was partly her clothes that made her look so aged, and the dyed hair against her pale face, dark roots showing.

‘It’s all I can fit into,’ she said bitterly, looking down at herself.

‘How long’ve you been back?’ Edie said. ‘Oh Ruby, we haven’t heard from you for so long. Why didn’t you write?’

Over tea, Ruby talked and talked.

‘I’ve never been good at letter-writing – you know that, Edie. And after a while I hadn’t got the heart. I made the biggest mistake of my life marrying Carl. It was all right for a few weeks – he’d been all charm, romantic, full of how well we were going to live with his business going well and that. And then it started. He’d been just the same to his first wife – one of the neighbours told me later. Wish she’d let me into a bit of this before I married him.’

‘What did he do?’ Edie asked carefully.

‘He’s a madman. One minute he’s all right – big blue eyes, full of it. The next he changes. Just like that.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘Covered in bruises I was. Couldn’t go out some days – ’specially if he’d given me a shiner. He had to be right about
everything
. Every little thing he’d make a fight about it. I got so’s I was frightened to breathe.’

‘Oh, my dear . . .’ Frances looked really distressed. ‘And what about the girls – where are they?’

‘He never hit them, I’ll say that for him. It were only me he used like a punchbag. But course, they hated him, seeing what he did, and Marleen was right lippy to him. The first year wasn’t as bad. I stuck that out. Then he seemed to get worse. He was jealous, always saying I was seeing other men when I was too frightened to set foot out of the house. We had six months of hell before I packed up and went to Wally’s mom and dad. Louisa took us in. She was horrified to find what Carl was really like. They’d known him years. Everyone’d blamed Martha, his first wife, for deserting him. Martha’d told hardly anyone the truth about him. Then we tried to patch it up. I mean I’d gone all the way over there to be with him. I went back to him and left the girls with Mr and Mrs Sorenson. But then Marleen started playing up. She was out all hours, giving them lip, hanging about with lads. They’re ever so strait-laced and they wouldn’t stand for it.’

She paused to drink some of her tea. ‘When I was back living in the house with Carl he started off again. Nice as pie for a week or two, then back to square one. I said to him in the end, “I’m not staying here putting up with this. Not any more.” And I cleared out and went back to the Sorensons. I met someone else, soon after, a bloke called Larry, and we were getting on well but I’d get home and they’d be on at me. “You’re a married woman. You’re acting like a street-walker . . .” All that sort of thing. And then Marleen went missing. A week she was away – in August, this was. Went off with some lad and they were living in his car, driving round. Greta was OK – she’s quieter, like. Did better at school, but our Marleen . . .’ Ruby shook her head. ‘I’ve got no say over ’er now. Anyhow she’s stayed over there. Says she’s engaged to Danny, the boy she’s with, and she’s staying and getting married. She’s seventeen. Seems happy enough.’

‘You left her behind?’ Edie was horrified. ‘And you’re back for good?’

‘I couldn’t force her to come – and I couldn’t stay on with Mr and Mrs Sorenson. Not any longer. By the end of it I couldn’t stand them and they couldn’t stand me. But they didn’t want Greta to go – that’s why they put up with me as long as they did.’

‘Well, where is she?’ Frances asked.

‘At Mom’s. Greta’s fond of Ed and Louisa, and they’re good to her, but she didn’t want to stay there without me. As for Carl – well, he’s not right in the head, Edie. He’s a sick man.’

‘Oh, I do wish you’d kept in touch, Ruby,’ Edie said, horrified by all she’d heard. ‘You never answered my letters. There was me thinking you were over there having the time of your life.’

‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Ruby said bitterly. ‘I know I should’ve, and I’m sorry. It’s just – sometimes I got so’s I could hardly get out of bed or drag myself about. I just used to stay in and eat to try to cheer myself up.’ Her face puckered. ‘I’ve let myself go, I know.’ Tears rolled down her face. ‘Oh Edie – I’ve been so miserable . . . And now I’ve lost my Marleen as well. I’ve had enough of it all . . .’

‘Oh, poor old Ruby—’ Edie got up and put her arms round Ruby’s shaking shoulders. It was terrible to see her looking so beaten and sad. Through all the other bad things that had happened to her, she had always kept her spark, but this time, Carl Christie seemed to have knocked it right out of her.

When she’d calmed a little and they were talking over a cup of tea, Frances asked gently, ‘What d’you think you’ll do now then, dear?’

‘Well—’ Ruby said, resignedly. ‘I s’pose the best thing to do is go and ask for my old job back.’

Within a few weeks, Ruby was back on one of the lines at Cadbury’s and had rented a place to live. Greta, who had grown up into a round-faced, blonde fourteen-year-old, quite quiet and pleasant, was also planning to apply to the Cadbury works when she could leave school the next year. Very occasionally they received a note from Marleen, whose engagement seemed to have become a rocky business. Ruby predicted that she’d soon be home, tail between her legs.

Ruby’s spirits did not stay low for long. She was still the optimist and Edie was delighted to be able to see her in the dining-hall at lunch and go for swims again. In fact, with Anatoli in her life – Ruby was endlessly curious about him – Ruby back, and Janet’s happy letters describing her new-found family, Edie was full of happiness. The only shadow in her life was her concern about Frances, who up until now had refused to see a doctor. Her face was drawn and there were dark shadows under her eyes, but she insisted that it was just old age and there was nothing wrong.

One Saturday in December, Edie went into town early before meeting Anatoli’s train from London. She wanted to go to the Bull Ring, or ‘chaos corner’ as everyone was calling it. She found going into town unpleasant and disorientating these days. The centre of Birmingham was a building site, its landscape constantly changing. Roads were being carved across the middle of the city, tunnels, pedestrian walkways. Buildings vanished, were replaced.

‘It doesn’t feel like the same place any more,’ she grumbled to Frances before leaving home. ‘If I don’t come back, you’ll know I’ve fallen down a big hole.’

She was making her way to the Rag Market when outside St Martin’s church she spotted a familiar face topped by a smart little hat, moving towards her through the other shoppers. Edie might well have pretended not to see her, but Esther Leishmann headed straight for her. She had seen nothing at all of the Leishmanns ever since David left for Israel.

‘Mrs Weale! How are you? You are missing young David a great deal, I am sure. But you know, we are getting such letters from him!’

Edie bridled immediately. Did the woman think David wasn’t writing to her as well?

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh, I hear ever such a lot from him.’

‘He seems totally set on staying in Israel. He has told you this?’

‘Well, of course,’ Edie snapped. ‘He was due home in August. He tells me everything.’ She stuck her chin out. ‘And I’m glad for him. He seems very happy indeed, especially with his fiancée, Gila.’

To Edie’s satisfaction, Esther Leishmann looked stunned.
‘Fiancee,
did you say? What is this fiancee? Of course he mentioned the girl to us, but he says nothing about marriage. I mean she is not even a religious Jew!’ She seemed really upset. ‘He was such a good boy – I don’t know why he wouldn’t go to a proper kibbutz where he could have studied. We have suggested to him several times that he move but always he refuses. In fact he has not been writing to us so often recently. We were afraid he had been ill, perhaps?’

‘Oh, no,’ Edie said, unable to prevent herself feeling some triumph about the woman’s lack of control over him. ‘He’s in very good health so far as I know. And he has been so happy at Hamesh. Now he is going to marry, I’m sure he won’t be moving. They are going to the Hebrew University.’

She spoke with pride, and when she had parted with Esther Leishmann she knew just how proud she felt. David had written to her recently, ‘I think I have to stop running from one extreme to the other and try to accept both strands of my life. Yes, I am Jewish, but I am also in some respects a Friend in my thinking. However, I have had to struggle with this. My conscience tells me that, when it comes to it, I shall have to be prepared to fight to defend the State of Israel – otherwise how can I call myself a Jew and an Israeli? I am a strange mongrel, I know, a Jewish Quaker! And the two things do not sit easily together. But somehow, that is who I am and I suppose I have to live with it.’

The price for David growing up and beginning to come to terms with himself was his living so far away. But for the first time, Edie glowed inside with pride at his strength in being able to do that, and in all that he had achieved.

February 1959

‘Mrs Hatton – come in. Take a seat.’

The doctor was rather elderly, and with a kindly, though detached manner. Edie, accompanying Frances, knew, somehow, what he was going to say. She also knew that Frances knew, though they had both been keeping up a pretence over Christmas that things were all right, despite her lack of appetite, the episodes of faintness. Anatoli had spent Christmas with them, and it had been a quiet, happy time, but even he, who did not know Frances nearly as well, could see that something was wrong.

‘It isn’t good news, I’m afraid, Mrs Hatton,’ the doctor was saying.

Frances sat very straight in her hat and coat, her hands in her lap. She looked composed, but as the doctor said the word
cancer
, Edie saw the bones move in her jaw, as if she had momentarily clenched her teeth. This barely noticeable reaction sent a deep pang through Edie. Poor, dearest Frances – she was being so calm, so brave! Edie found it hard to concentrate on what the doctor was saying because she was trying so determinedly not to cry. His tone was enough to tell her. As she helped Frances up, and in a daze they left the surgery, Edie had come away with the grains of information that it was cancer, that it had begun to spread to her liver, that Frances, her dearest friend, was dying, or would be soon.

They stepped out into the freezing street. There had been heavy snow that winter and filthy, icy mush lay along the edges of the road. Edie took Frances’s arm.

‘Well,’ Frances said, because somebody had to say something. ‘I must organize myself.’

‘Oh Frances . . .’ Edie said.

Hearing her heartbroken tone, Frances squeezed her arm.

‘Come along, dear. Perk up. We’ve known really, haven’t we? We’ll go in and have a nice cup of tea by the fire together. Let’s not be miserable.’

Somehow as soon as the doctor had confirmed to them all how sick Frances really was, she quickly became more so. Edie was full of worries.

‘It’s not that I mind looking after her,’ she confided to Ruby as they ate their lunchtime bowl of soup together one day. ‘I’d do anything for her. It’s just – I’m frightened – I don’t know if I can do it properly.’

‘Well, you can’t – not on your own,’ Ruby said. The colour had come back into her cheeks a little bit since she’d come home, and though she was still very plump she looked better in herself. Now she was back at Cad-bury’s she had flung herself into the Bournville Dramatic Society with some of her old pals. ‘What about when you’re at work?’

‘I know.’ Edie chewed the end of her thumb, frowning with worry. ‘Mrs Jones next door said she’ll help out, but she can’t be there all day . . .’

‘Well, when the time comes, she’ll need to go into hospital.’

‘She says she doesn’t mind,’ Edie said. ‘Only I’d feel I was letting her down if I didn’t look after her.’

All that spring was taken up with Frances’s illness. Edie found it heartbreaking to watch. She could eat less and less and her rounded, comforting figure was vanishing, the weight melting from her bones. She was very calm, very patient, but by the middle of March she was already sinking fast. Death was beginning to inscribe itself in every line of her pinched face. How long did she have left? Edie had received a letter from Janet saying that she was trying to make arrangements to come as soon as possible. But how long would she be? They had heard nothing since, and Edie began to wonder whether she would make it in time.