Dead to Me (20 page)

‘It was a crime that made you run away,’ she said more boldly than she felt. ‘And you half killed me before you left. Mother and I had a terrible time, forced to come here cap in hand to Aunt Hazel. So I ask you why you would imagine I’d want to see you?’

He took a couple of steps towards her. Thinking he was going to strike her, she flinched and backed away.

‘Don’t flinch from me, I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said, holding out his hands towards her. ‘Hear me out! You can have no idea of the forces that brought me to that point,’ he said. ‘Your mother was a spendthrift, I was under terrible strain. I’m not that person any more. I want to make it up to you.’

‘I’m glad to hear that. But whatever kind of person you are now, I still don’t want you near me,’ she said defiantly. She pointed angrily at the oven. ‘Mother put her head in that because of you. Aunt Hazel might not have had a heart attack and died, if she hadn’t been put under so much strain. As for me, I had to deal with girls at school whispering about you, the police calling here all the time, and the stigma of having a swindler for a father.’

‘Cynthia gassed herself?’

‘Yes, she did, and I bet you knew that already. And that Aunt Hazel died, or you wouldn’t have come.’

He didn’t answer immediately, just looked at her with a slightly hangdog expression.

‘You think that little of me?’ he said eventually.

‘I think nothing of you,’ she snapped back. ‘So get out now.’

‘Oh, Verity,’ he said, his voice suddenly very soft. ‘I am sorry I hurt you this badly. Let me make amends now and help you. It must be lonely living here all alone.’

His sympathetic tone affected her momentarily, but she reminded herself of what he was. ‘I don’t live alone,’ she glowered at him. ‘I have a friend as a lodger, and I have a boyfriend too. I don’t need you or want you in my life, so get out now or I will telephone the police and tell them you’re here.’

‘You can, if you like,’ he shrugged. ‘They aren’t looking for me any more, I sorted it all out before I went off to South Africa. If I look a bit rough, it’s just because I came rushing back to see if you were alright now the war seems to be heating up.’

She was just going to tell him that made no difference to her feelings for him, and she didn’t believe him anyway, when Amy came down the stairs in her dressing gown, looking curiously at him.

‘This is Archie Wood, my father,’ Verity said. ‘He’s just leaving, aren’t you?’

Dense as always, and not picking up on a strained atmosphere, Amy smiled and held out her hand to him. ‘I’m so pleased to meet you,’ she said. ‘Verity and I work together, but it’s late to leave now. I could go in with Verity, and you could have my bed.’

Verity gritted her teeth. ‘Amy! I just said he’s leaving.’

‘I’m glad my daughter has friends with good manners,’ Archie smiled. ‘Verity promised me a cup of tea which
hasn’t transpired yet, and as it happens I think I’ve missed the last train too.’

‘Then I’ll make you the tea,’ Amy said, going over to the kettle which was just coming to the boil. ‘When I heard the door, then raised voices, I was afraid it was that warden again. He’s told us off many times for not closing the curtains properly.’

Verity knew she’d lost this battle. Amy didn’t know what her father had done, and this wasn’t the time to spill family secrets.

She’d just have to go along with it and let him stay till the morning.

Half an hour later, Verity and Amy were lying side by side in bed with the light out.

‘You never told me anything about your dad,’ Amy whispered. ‘Why not? He seems so nice.’

‘He’s not, he’s a real snake,’ Verity whispered back. ‘And thanks to you he’s got a foot in the door. So you are going to help me boot him out tomorrow before we go to work, understood?’

‘Okay,’ Amy muttered. ‘I’m sorry.’

Amy fell asleep almost immediately, her breathing deep and steady, but Verity lay awake rigid with tension. However much he might deny it, she sensed that the only reason he’d come here was because he’d fallen on hard times and had nowhere else to go. That would make it hard to get rid of him.

Was he speaking the truth about the police no longer looking for him?

It was true they hadn’t come round here to check up for a very long time now, not since Aunt Hazel died, and they
had said they thought he was in South Africa. So perhaps he had sorted it all out, or even had a spell in prison. Yet even if he had been punished for his crime, he still didn’t deserve any loyalty or sympathy from her.

Ninety-nine per cent of her brain was telling her he was bad news, that he might hurt her again, but the remaining one per cent was telling her to give him a chance, that he was the only family she had left, and maybe it was her mother’s greed and idleness that had caused him to go wrong.

She barely slept and shortly after six o’clock she got up, tired of tossing and turning. After washing and dressing very quietly, she slunk downstairs and took a cup of tea into the back garden to drink it.

It was a beautiful morning, the sun already rising in a clear blue sky, birds singing merrily. Normally such a morning would make her feel joyful and invigorated. She probably would have written a letter to Miller, sharing her thoughts. But her father’s presence upstairs was worrying, and she knew that she really did need to make him leave today.

She and Amy had to leave for work by twenty to eight, so she needed to act now if they were not to be late. She drank the remainder of her tea and went inside to pour some for her father and Amy, then carried the cups up the stairs.

Amy got hers first; Verity shook her awake and hastily told her she was to get washed and dressed quickly. Then she went into the other room and flicked back the curtains.

‘Wake up, Father,’ she said sharply.

He had undressed down to a vest which looked grey
with wear, and he had thick dark stubble on his chin. People had always said he was a good-looking man back in their days at Daleham Gardens, but no one would say that now. Seen in broad daylight, his nose and cheeks were covered in red broken veins, and his shoulders and bare arms were white and flabby. He also smelled sour.

‘Amy and I have to leave by half seven for work, and you can’t stay here.’

He opened one eye and looked at her. ‘Why can’t I?’

‘I told you, we’ve got to go to work. And anyway, this is Amy’s room and she only allowed you to stay in it for one night.’

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said. ‘As you are not twenty-one yet, I am still your legal guardian and therefore entitled to stay here.’

‘Then I shall have to go to the police,’ she said firmly. ‘I won’t have you here, Father, I have the law on my side. You abandoned Mother and me, you can’t just come back when it suits you and throw your weight around.’

He sat up in bed, calmly picked up his tea and took a long drink of it. ‘Oh, can’t I?’ he said eventually, his lips twisted into a sneer. ‘We’ll see about that. Suppose I tell the police you were using this house for immoral purposes?’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Verity retorted. ‘Do you think they would take the word of an embezzler?’

‘That, my dear, is all stowed away now. I gave myself up a couple of years ago and sorted it all out and paid back the money. And it isn’t ridiculous for me to say you are being immoral. I know you had a young man living here last year, and now it seems you’ve got a girl in here, and you could be running a little business on the side.’

‘We’re doing no such thing,’ Verity gasped indignantly. ‘Amy is a friend from work and my lodger. That’s all.’

Her stomach gave a sickening lurch to think he had been spying on her. The insinuation that she was using the house for immoral purposes was hideous, she wondered if that fat busybody down the road had said something.

‘Run along to work now,’ he said, grinning broadly as if he knew he’d taken the wind out of her sails. ‘Why should you mind your old dad being here anyway? It’s quite normal for a father to want to visit his daughter now and then.’

‘You aren’t normal,’ she blurted out. ‘You’ve only come here because you’ve got nowhere else to go. I’ll let you stay today, just because I haven’t got time now to fight with you, but when I get home tonight you must leave.’

She turned and fled the room, because she was afraid she was going to be sick. Instinctively she knew he was going to stay for as long as it suited him, whatever she said or did.

All day long at work she could think of nothing else but her father. She guessed he would spend the day searching the entire house for something he could use against her, and although she couldn’t think of anything there that could be useful to him, just the thought of him searching through drawers and cupboards was alarming.

It hadn’t helped that Amy had thought it exciting that he’d turned up. She really was a chump sometimes. But then Amy’s father was probably a kind, caring man who could never harm anyone.

‘Fancy
Amy leaving the Post Office!’ Beryl remarked to Verity. ‘Do you know why?’

Both girls were putting on their dungarees in readiness to climb telegraph poles and check the wiring for faults. Beryl was twenty-five and an experienced driver, so she drove the van and they took turns in doing the pole climbing, the one on the ground holding the ladder steady.

Verity was puzzled at Beryl’s remark. ‘She hasn’t left. She went home to Southend to see her family for a few days, but she’s coming back.’

‘She isn’t, she handed in her notice a week ago.’

‘No! That can’t be right, she’s due back tomorrow or the next day. She would’ve told me, if she was leaving.’

Beryl shook her head. ‘Well, all I can say is that Miss Haig asked me last week if you two had had a falling out, because Amy had given in her notice and would be leaving at the end of the week. I told her that, as far as I knew, you were still as thick as thieves. Then she asked me not to talk about it, not even to you, as Amy didn’t want anyone questioning her.’

Verity just stood in shocked surprise, the braces on her dungarees still dangling down unbuttoned. She couldn’t really believe what Beryl had said, but as Beryl was neither a troublemaker nor a liar, and Miss Haig was the supervisor, it had to be true.

It did make sense of why Amy took so much stuff with her last Friday. She’d claimed it was just her winter clothes, which she was going to leave at her parents’ home to make more space, and Verity hadn’t noticed if everything else was gone too.

But why did she go? Was it because of having to give her room up for Archie?

Amy had seemed to get on well with him, better than Verity did. It was she who started calling him by his Christian name, and Verity followed along with it.

Could he have said or done something she didn’t like? Verity squirmed at the idea, as memories of what he made her do to him came back to her. Yet even if he did something truly horrible to her, and she ran off because of it, why leave her job too? Besides, surely if he had assaulted her in some way she would have said something to Verity, if only a vague hint?

‘Oh dear, you really didn’t know, did you?’ Beryl said, in concern. ‘How strange this is! Amy has always been one for blabbing everything out. If she had a grievance, the whole world would know. I can’t imagine how she managed to keep this under her hat.’ She paused for a moment, seemingly deep in thought. ‘Maybe it’s family problems, like her mum’s ill or getting hysterical about the bombing. Southend is, after all, likely to get a hammering being on the coast and on the way to London.’

Verity was too shaken to reply. Beryl was what Ruby would have called a ‘Posh Bint’. She came from one of the huge houses up in Blackheath, her father was a judge, and she had that poised, polished look of a
Vogue
model. Slender, with sleek dark hair and sharp cheekbones, her eyes
were a strange and beautiful amber colour which made everyone take a second look at her.

Verity loved being her work partner, because she had a great sense of humour, she was interesting and worldly, and more than that she was very accepting of people, whatever their background. Verity liked that and wished that there were more like her, especially now that it looked as if England was about to witness what war really meant.

The evacuation of the retreating troops from Dunkirk in the days before the 4th of June had been a sobering warning of just how much better equipped the German army was. A flotilla of boats rescued 215,000 British troops and 102,250 French from the beaches while the Luftwaffe strafed them with continual gunfire. With somewhere in the region of 11,000 men losing their lives, it must have been hell for every man there.

Verity had seen Pathé News at the cinema and the sight of thousands of different kinds of craft – fishing boats, pleasure boats, ferries and even rowing boats – sailing gallantly out from England’s coastal towns to Dunkirk, their owners intent on doing their part in rescuing men, had everyone in the cinema crying with pride at their courage and endurance.

But then the whole retreat from Dunkirk was played out by the press as a triumph of courage over adversity, evidence of the bulldog spirit. They didn’t print the numbers of soldiers who died, perhaps because they wanted to keep up morale, but the news soon leaked out. Apparently, there were over a thousand civilian casualties in the town of Dunkirk on just the first day too.

There was, however, a mention of ninety-seven prisoners
of war, massacred at La Bassée Canal, lined up against a barn and shot. Only two men survived, and perhaps they released this story as a perfect piece of anti-German propaganda. As all the British tanks, trucks and heavy artillery had to be left behind in the evacuation, the whole country could appreciate that it was going to need a monumental effort on everyone’s part to rearm, to build new trucks and tanks, to say nothing of rebuilding the faith that the Allies could win the war. Right now it looked as if the Germans might invade England at any time.

It was partly because of Dunkirk, and the events that followed soon after, that Verity didn’t force Archie to leave the house. Hundreds of wounded soldiers were being brought back to London hospitals to be treated, Paris fell to the Germans on the 14th of June, and then there was the first daylight bombing in London in early July. In the face of so much tragedy, it seemed cruel to turn her father out when he had no home. She also thought, as things were looking so black and scary, perhaps she and Amy needed a man around the house.

Whatever her misgivings about letting her father stay, he had his good points. Back in Daleham Gardens, as she remembered, he’d been sarcastic, lacking in humour, and had little in the way of conversation. She wondered now, as an adult, if that was because of her mother’s constant carping, and how she was never satisfied with anything, because he showed no sign of those traits any more.

He was actually very good company, making both her and Amy laugh and taking an interest in their work. He was handy too, doing little repair jobs around the house, and he had a knack of being able to get black market goods.
Just a week ago he’d come home with some fillet steak and tins of salmon. He hadn’t been at all nasty to Verity, even making supper for her and Amy occasionally before disappearing to the pub.

Sometimes he had money, but Verity had no idea where he earned it. But at those times he was generous, treating both her and Amy to dinner out, or the cinema. Once he’d even given Verity a ten-pound note to help with the housekeeping. But when he had no money, he could be a little grouchy, often asking her to lend him some.

The main problem with him being in the house wasn’t so much Verity’s old grievances against him, although she certainly hadn’t forgiven or forgotten, she just had too much else to think about to dwell on them. The problem was the lack of privacy, and having to share the bed with Amy. Verity missed not being able to read at night, not having a room just for herself, and she had concerns that if Miller wanted to come to London, he couldn’t stay with her.

But even the question of Miller didn’t worry her too much, as she was planning to travel up to Scotland at the end of August for a two-week holiday. Miller knew a couple who would be glad to have her as a paying guest.

Now to hear that calm, easy-going Amy had rushed off without so much as an explanation, or even a goodbye, was very odd. Verity wasn’t so much concerned about losing her rent, even though she relied on it to pay the bills, she wanted to know what had made her friend leave a job she liked, and the person she called her best friend.

Verity also didn’t relish being alone in the house with her father, but thinking on that made her realize he must
have had a hand in Amy leaving. Did he want to be on his own with her? And if so, why?

She recalled that when he first arrived, she’d got the idea he had something up his sleeve. Unfortunately, he’d lulled her into a false sense of security recently, and she’d stopped watching him so closely.

‘Are you going to stand there gawping all day, or do I have to be a contortionist, climbing the post as well as holding the ladder?’

Beryl’s sarcastic remark made Verity realize she’d been lost in thought for some time and still hadn’t buttoned up her dungarees. ‘I’m sorry, I was pondering on why Amy has skipped off. She used to tell me everything, I can’t believe she’d go without so much as a goodbye.’

‘Forget Amy for now. Up the ladder with you,’ Beryl said, holding it in place for her. ‘I can see a broken wire from down here, you might need to put a whole new length in.’

Verity climbed to the top of the ladder and then used the footholds on the pole to reach the top to check the wiring. She liked this part of the job. Well, at least on a warm, sunny day like today, when she could see for miles over rooftops. They were close to Crystal Palace today, and the trees in the big park there looked like a forest from up here. She didn’t think it would be so pleasant in the pouring rain or in icy conditions, though. So far she and Beryl hadn’t been sent out to restore telephone wires after a dropped bomb, but they both knew that was going to come any day now.

Their supervisor had informed them recently, ‘Telephones are a vital form of communication during wartime’.

As Beryl had said, ‘Trust her to state the bleeding obvious.’

The Battle of Britain that Winston Churchill had promised would follow the Battle of France had begun. On Pathé News, at the pictures, they saw the dogfights in the sky above Kent and Sussex between the British Spitfires and Hurricanes and the German Messerschmitts. It brought tears to Verity’s eyes to think that those brave and dashing young airmen gambled with their lives each day to try and keep England safe. After their example she didn’t think it would be fitting to whinge if she was sent out to mend telephone wires in a bit of rain.

‘Do you know Amy’s home address in Southend?’ Beryl asked as Verity climbed down.

Verity shook her head. ‘There was no reason for her to tell me it. I wish she had, I’d write and ask what I did wrong.’

‘Maybe it’s a man,’ Beryl said with a smile. ‘I’m becoming much more impulsive, especially about men. I’ve noticed many women are. I suppose it’s because we could be killed by a bomb tomorrow, and we don’t want to die wondering what it was all about.’

Verity laughed, because she was sure Beryl already knew everything about men and sex.

She was considered a femme fatale by the staff in the Post Office because of her admirers. Only a few days ago, a handsome American colonel came to meet her from work and took her for dinner at The Ritz. Beryl just laughed when asked about him and claimed he was an old family friend. That may have been true, but she always had a quiet confidence about her that suggested she could get any man she wanted.

‘I hope my father didn’t make her run off,’ Verity blurted out. She had promised herself, after Susan Wallace was so mean to her at school, that she would never, ever tell another person about her family. She had, of course, told Miller some edited parts, but he was different, she somehow knew he would never use anything against her.

All she’d told Amy was that her father had left her and her mother, and they’d come to stay in Weardale Road with her Aunt Hazel. She said that her mother died a year later, and her aunt another couple of years on. Amy was so dizzy most of the time that she probably forgot the details almost instantly, and she wasn’t one for asking questions anyway.

‘Do you mean you think he might have made a pass at her?’ Beryl asked.

‘I certainly hope not,’ Verity said. ‘But he can be devious, and I think he might have wanted her out of the way because he has some kind of plan. You know how dumb Amy could be, it would be easy enough to scare her off.’

Beryl stared hard at Verity. Her eyes looked as if they were boring right into Verity’s mind and reading what was in there. ‘When you are ready to tell me the whole story about your dad, I’ll be all ears.’

Verity gulped. She wanted to spill it out, but she didn’t dare. ‘There’s nothing much to tell,’ she lied. ‘He’s a bit of a bounder, that’s all. I expect all it was with Amy was homesickness, and she couldn’t bring herself to admit she wanted to be with her mum.’

‘Maybe.’

Beryl raised one of her perfectly shaped eyebrows, and Verity knew then she didn’t believe her.

Verity didn’t get home that evening until after nine. While on the bus she heard there had been a bomb dropped that morning on the docks in East London. She knew the RAF were off on bombing raids at night over Germany now, and wondered how long it would be before the Germans retaliated with force. She suddenly felt really scared.

‘You’re late tonight,’ Archie said as she walked in. ‘I’ve kept your dinner hot for you. It’s bangers.’

Verity barely glanced at the dinner plate on top of a saucepan of hot water, with the saucepan lid covering her dinner. ‘What did you do or say to Amy to make her leave? She’s left the job too, probably because she couldn’t face me.’

‘I didn’t say or do anything,’ he said, his eyes wide as if he was entirely innocent. ‘She told me her mum was a worry guts, that she was terrified they’d start dropping bombs down in Southend and she might be buried under the rubble. Amy asked what I thought she should do.’

Verity was pretty certain Amy had never said such a thing to him; she’d always claimed her mum was a very tough woman. ‘So I suppose you said she must go to her poor, scared mum?’ she spat at him.

‘No, I didn’t, I only said she ought to do what she thought was right. She said she couldn’t travel into London to work from Southend, but I said the Post Office would need people down there too.’

‘You’re lying, I know you are,’ Verity roared at him. ‘If you’d had that conversation with her, she would’ve told me and asked my opinion too. She would never have handed in her notice in secret, or left here pretending she was going home for the weekend, that wasn’t her way. So tell me how you forced her hand and why.’

There were a few moments of complete silence before he spoke.

‘The truth is that she’s afraid of you,’ he said eventually in a quiet, steady voice. ‘She always did what you told her to do, she admitted that to me a while ago.’