Christmas Wish (12 page)

Bradley Fitts had inherited his father’s callous disposition. The arrogance had come with being respected since an early age as the son of a frightening man.

His tone was ugly as he counted out the money.

‘It had better all be here. Wouldn’t want no creaming off the top, would we Winnie?’

Her retaliation was swift and meant to deflate him.

‘No. That’s why I’ve numbered and recorded the notes. So that there’s no creamin’.’

She noticed the sudden ballooning of his cheeks as he clenched his jaw.

Her sharp little eyes never left his face.

Yes, Bradley Fitts. I’m an old bird and better young cocks than you have tried to outwit me.

Her gaze dropped to his shiny shoes. The rug he was standing on had pink flowers at each corner. At the centre a huge
one blossomed. She barely restrained herself from smiling. If only he knew what he was standing on.

It had been with great joy that she’d lined out the aperture in the stone floor. Yes, there was a cashbox locked in a strong cupboard that Reuben had supplied. That was where she kept the dues rightly belonging to Reuben and from which she had fetched the sum she’d handed over to his son.

But the hole in the floor. That was a different matter entirely, known to her and her alone. The money within was her money, earned from her wages by listening to the advice of the clever men who entered this house; bankers, titled gentlemen from both houses of parliament. And that wasn’t all. Besides money there was a complete record of all the illicit businesses run by Bradley Fitts. At the threat of any harm, those records would find their way to Scotland Yard.

Neither son nor father knew of her meticulous record keeping of information as well as cash, though she had hinted at it in her letter. She knew so much about Reuben Fitts; of his business dealings, of how much money he had. She also knew that people who had upset him were rarely seen again so she’d made two copies of those records, one of which was with her solicitor. She would be safe because she’d made Reuben aware of this.

Magda was on her way to the pictures with her orange-haired friend Susan who had started a job at the brewery.

‘I still can’t believe it,’ Magda was saying. ‘I’ve always wanted to become a nurse or a doctor since my mother died. I knew I had to stay on at school, but didn’t think I’d be able to. Can you believe that?’

Susan guffawed with laughter. ‘Never mind that, I can’t believe you actually WANT to stay on at school. Fourteen, and that was it for me. Love working for a living. Love earning money.’

‘I can understand that.’

Susan came from a poor family. It was understandable that she wanted some money at last, at least enough to enjoy herself before she got married and had kids – which was what most girls wanted. But not Magda. Magda burned with a desire for something else entirely. Was it so wrong to lie a little in order to get what she wanted? Winnie had convinced her that it was not.

‘The end justifies the means,’ Winnie said to her. ‘A lot of
good will come of this. Thanks to the Great War, more and more women have become doctors, and if the news from Germany is to be believed, there’ll be more women doctors in demand before very long.’

Winnie sighed. ‘Another war to inspire human progress. Sad as it is.’

Winnie had also informed her how come she had secured an interview and what she was supposed to say when she got there.

‘You don’t live here in Edward Street. This is the address where you live,’ she’d said, handing her what looked like a sheaf of examination papers. ‘And your folk are fine people already involved in the medical profession. You’re an upper class girl on paper. Behave accordingly. Oh, and tell them you’re twenty, not eighteen. Being the right age is important. And having the right background, and that’s been arranged.’

It never failed to amaze her that Winnie knew such very influential people and that some of them were not quite as upright and honest as they should be.

‘I’d be lying,’ she’d said to Winnie.

Winnie had fixed her with a stern expression. ‘If you wish to give assistance to a poor woman in labour, then lying is what you have to do. Imagine her dying without you being around to help her. That should make it easier.’

It wasn’t easy, but she resolved to live with her reservations. One lie balanced out by one good deed.

The letter had come that morning inviting her for an interview at Queen Mary’s Hospital Medical School. Money to live on would be the problem.

Susan offered her home-grown wisdom.

‘You’ve got a bit of time between the interview and starting at the hospital. How about your old man?’

‘My father?’ Magda grimaced. ‘I haven’t heard from him in years, and neither has Aunt Bridget if she’s to be believed.’

‘How about your mother’s family?’

Magda shook her head. ‘My mother was Italian,’ she said, as though that explained everything, especially the fact that the family was too distant to expect money from that quarter.

‘Mine was a pushover. That’s what my dad said,’ said Susan with a grin.

When Magda got back from the pictures, Aunt Bridget was standing at the door. A tall man with greying fair hair and the look of a seaman was standing there looking awkward.

Her aunt was saying something. ‘Lost at sea you say? You’re sure?’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Brodie.’

‘Have you got the pay that’s owing?’

The man nodded. ‘I have Mrs Brodie. ’Tis here, plus his payment card for his insurance with the Sailors’ Benevolent Society. There’s a fair bit to come, and what with no burial to …’

Suddenly aware what he’d said, he looked embarrassed and apologised again.

Aunt Bridget took the oilskin bundle from him.

‘A few Hail Marys will do as well as a coffin for my poor man,’ she said, her voice cracking as though she were about to break down.

‘A good thought, Mrs Brodie. A good thought indeed.’

Bridget’s breasts heaved in a big sigh prior to looking at him and chancing a weak smile.

‘Would you care to come in for a cup of tea whilst you’re here, or a little of something stronger. I can soon send the girl up to the offie to get us something to drown our sorrows with.’

Bridget’s manner couldn’t have been clearer. One man was
gone, but here was another she might be able to get her claws into.

The seaman spluttered his apologies but declared he had a ship awaiting his return before setting off to Venezuela.

‘Uncle James is dead?’

Magda was saddened; no more jellied eels, no more dog racing when the only sum won had been by virtue of half a crown that Aunt Bridget had stolen from her husband’s pocket.

‘Ah yes,’ murmured Bridget, impatient fingers loosening the ties of the oilskin parcel the man had handed her. ‘But he’s left me a bit, so I won’t be destitute, what with you leaving school and bringing a bit in too. Yes, I shall be fine, though as a widow I can always do with a bit more …’

Magda recognised the conniving look that came to her face. Bridget was planning something.

She didn’t know quite what until she discovered a brand new writing pad with a couple of pages missing. Her aunt had written to someone, but who?

The most obvious possibility was to James’s brother, Joe Brodie, her father. But letters took a while to catch up with a man at sea.

The other possibility was some other relative she knew nothing of. Not grandparents. Aunt Bridget had assured her they were dead.

Asking her would do no good. She would simply deny ever writing anything.

But Aunt Bridget rarely told the truth.

It was the middle of June 1932 when Bridget’s letter arrived in Ireland. There were two armchairs set to either side of the kitchen fire at the farm near Dunavon, funny-shaped old things with hoods over the top and stout little buttons holding the upholstery in place.

It was to these chairs that Dermot Brodie and his wife retreated after a hard day’s work and mostly after the girls had gone to bed.

Molly Brodie had wept when she’d heard of Isabella’s death and had been more than willing to take in the twin girls, Venetia and Anna Marie. She’d also suggested to Dermot that they take in the eldest girl and the boy too, but he’d rejected the idea.

‘’Tis up to Joe to arrange. They’re his responsibility and however they turn out as a result of his actions, is down to him and him alone.’

It was to one of these chairs that Molly went now, sinking into its nest-like comfort, though feeling no comfort at all.

She had read the letter from her daughter-in-law, Bridget,
stating that James had been drowned. The first reading had not been enough, and nor had the second. She read it for a third time.

The letter had been delivered to the village post office. The postmaster, a Welshman, an aloof but dutiful man, had forwarded it on via a boy on a bicycle; hence it had not arrived until they were sitting down to supper.

She’d informed her husband that they’d received a letter. He’d instructed her to place it behind the clock on the mantelpiece until they’d eaten. He did not approve of reading at the table. Neither did he wish an audience whilst he read. He would read it first before passing it to his wife, seeing as it was addressed to the pair of them.

It was now gone nine o’clock. The girls had gone to bed without argument.

Dermot had reached for the letter, opened it and read.

His face had gone white.

He read it a second time before passing it to Molly.

As Molly cried, Dermot sucked on his pipe as though it was lit, when as yet it was not.

His teeth still gripping the pipe, he put his thoughts into words, aiming his voice at the glow of the fire grate.

‘Them and their dreams of seeing the world. They should have stayed here, the both of them. On the land where they belonged.’

He drew once more on his pipe then spit into the fire where it sizzled and vanished.

‘A disappointment. The pair of them.’

Magda bubbled with excitement as she told Winnie all about the interview at Queen Mary’s Hospital for the East End.

‘I still can’t believe I’ve got this far.’

‘And you’ll go much further,’ said Winnie. ‘You’re a bright girl and we need more women doctors in this country. Women understand women’s ailments better. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t become one.’

‘There is one thing that might stop me, Winnie. It costs money to attend the medical school, money I haven’t got.’

‘Can you not write to your father?’

Magda shook her head.

‘Have you grandparents?’

Magda sighed. ‘According to Aunt Bridget, they died years ago.’

Winnie looked intensely at the young woman she’d become so fond of. Was she being silly thinking her own daughter would have looked like her? Possibly, but seeing as it soothed her long-standing heartache, did it really matter?

‘Magda, what would you say if there was somebody to
sponsor your studies? How would that be?’

‘Wonderful, but I can’t see …’ She paused, hardly daring to hope and overwhelmed by Winnie’s generosity. ‘I couldn’t possibly pay you back. You’ve done so much for me already.’

‘Oh yes you could. In the best way of all. I would sponsor you, Magda. You remind me of the daughter I lost. Like your mother, she might have survived if there’d been a doctor around.’

Magda stroked her heated brow, the room seeming to spin around her. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘Nothing. Leave it with me, Magda Brodie, and you’ll be a doctor yet.’

All that night, Magda barely slept, her mind reeling at her good fortune and the prospects for the future. It would be two months before she actually entered the hallowed portals of Queen Mary’s and she needed to do something in the meantime. Money wouldn’t just put food on the table, it would put clothes on her back. She couldn’t possibly present herself at Queen Mary’s in clothes that had been unpicked, let out and let down; childish clothes, clothes that no longer properly fitted the young woman she had become. And she would not accept any more of Winnie’s generosity. She had to do something for herself.

She had the luck to be taken on by Mrs Skinner, a woman of wide proportions and a huge laugh that rippled all the way down to her belly. It was she who had taken over the pitch Danny used to run with his father.

Warm thoughts came to her when she thought of Danny, wondering how tall he was now, how much more of a man than the last time she’d seen him.

Working for Mrs Skinner turned out to be a godsend.

For the first time in her life, Magda had money of her own. She also had more than one young man trying to catch her eye.

‘I’m not ready for that,’ she’d said to Mrs Skinner who fancied herself as a matchmaker. ‘I’m not rushing into anything. Not until I’ve made my way in the world.’

It turned out the customers in the market liked Magda’s dark good looks and friendly smile, the way she could be as bawdy as the worst of them or as politely spoken as the best.

Though Mrs Skinner couldn’t pay her too much, she had enough to buy food and a few decent clothes from the secondhand clothes stall.

‘
Voila
! I have a nice green jumper here,’ said Jean Claude, the Frenchman who ran it. He’d come over after the Great War having fallen in love with an English nurse. ‘And a skirt. It is silk. Lovely for the evening. And a jacket. Tweed. Ideal for the winter I think.’

He also found her a slim coat in lovely silver grey astrakhan with a fetching fur collar.

‘I can’t afford this as well,’ Magda had said to him whilst nuzzling her chin and nose into the fur. ‘Mothballs,’ she said, wrinkling her nose.

‘The balls of the moth will vanish,’ Jean Claude responded in his inimitable way. ‘Talcum powder. Or lemon juice brushed through it; no more balls of moth!’

‘But I can’t afford …’

‘You can pay me weekly.’

He leaned into her, his black moustache almost tickling her cheek.

‘Most of my customers look like sacks in these beautiful things. You will look beautiful. You must always wear beautiful things.’