England's Lane

New York • London

© 2012 by Joseph Connolly

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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By the same author

Fiction

POOR SOULS

THIS IS IT

STUFF

SUMMER THINGS

WINTER BREAKS

IT CAN'T GO ON

S.O.S.

THE WORKS

LOVE IS STRANGE

JACK THE LAD AND BLOODY MARY

Non-fiction

COLLECTING MODERN FIRST EDITIONS

P. G. WODEHOUSE: AN ILLUSTRATED BIOGRAPHY

JEROME K. JEROME: A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY

MODERN FIRST EDITIONS: THEIR VALUE TO COLLECTORS

THE PENGUIN BOOK QUIZ BOOK

CHILDREN'S MODERN FIRST EDITIONS

BESIDE THE SEASIDE

ALL SHOOK UP: A FLASH OF THE FIFTIES

CHRISTMAS

WODEHOUSE

FABER AND FABER: EIGHTY YEARS OF BOOK COVER DESIGN

To Patricia

In the Beginning …

Chapter 1 You Are Mad and I Am Right

Chapter 2 It's Truly Very Clean

Chapter 3 That's the Way it Goes

Chapter 4 Anything Not Familiar

Chapter 5 A Day Unlike Others

Chapter 6 He Knows Nothing

Chapter 7 Best Interests

Chapter 8 We All Need Help

Chapter 9 More the Merrier

Chapter 10 Merely a Matter of Convenience

Chapter 11 Flesh and Blood

Chapter 12 Got to be a Man About It

Chapter 13 The Art of Persuasion

Chapter 14 Are You All Right?

Chapter 15 All I've Ever Wanted

Chapter 16 Spilled Milk

And in the End …

I am a capable woman. And no, I don't really believe that it's vain of me to say so. Coping, when your own life and that of everyone around you is daily in danger, is really not so very terribly admirable. I am a capable woman, yes—but so very many of us had to be, during the long dark days of the war. We had to have strength. Rather surprisingly, it grew within you—the mind and body, I think, they come to sense its necessity. I drew upon it very largely in order to try to overcome the loss of my sister, who was dearer to me then than anyone on earth. This, though, all of this, it came a few years after. At a time when I foolishly believed that death and dying were over and done with. And I needed even more strength then, and of quite a different sort, to deal with the strangeness that emerged from her terrible passing—so very unexpected was this bright new love that ripened and burst inside of me (so shocking, and just unstoppably) for Paul, the little boy, hardly more than one year old, whom she left behind her. The pain from loving him, from knowing now that to me he is just quite utterly everything there is in the world, can simply stop my throat, and yet somehow it is charged with such sweetness. The agony of anxiety for his every moment fills me with warmth, a wash of
warmth in which I nearly luxuriate, so happy am I to have it: and then I feel guilt for that.

Yes: guilt for that—and I suppose … no, not suppose, I don't suppose it, of course I really do know why. Because I carried within me the knowledge that never would I have that, a child, and then suddenly one came to me, so how could I ever deserve it? Eunice, my sister, he was lost to her, and so was her very own life. That must have been the worst of her dying—she had had time to think of it, I know. That must have been the worst of her dying—knowing that soon she must leave him. And now he's mine. So yes: guilt for that.

To me, the war itself was not really so appalling as afterward—everything that happened, all that I felt, when finally it was over. I had married Jim in 1940 when he was home from leave—one day he had been given, just a one-day pass—and I am being neither flippant nor willful, please do believe me, when I tell you that I really can't remember exactly why I did that. The reasoning behind it. Not love. No—not love. Well obviously no, not that. A few of us, quite a few of the girls who were working in munitions, were happily doing it. Sounds so terribly silly now—a gang of young women who barely even knew one another debating and then deciding between themselves that on the whole they might as well go ahead and do it: get married. There never seemed to be a shortage of eligible young men, most of them soldiers. One girl, Una—she married a boy she had only just met. At a dance. Eighteen, the two of them were. And then the following weekend they had gone to the pictures. Next thing we heard, she was engaged. She had a Woolworth's ring on her finger which she waggled in our faces while hitching up her skirt and parading up and down the canteen as if she were, oh … I don't know—as if she were a Norman Hartnell model at a West End fashion show, or something. We did laugh.
They married the very same week, and then the boy—can't remember his name—was stationed in Africa, Egypt it might have been, and that, I am afraid, is the very last she heard of him. A more common story than you'd like to think. She didn't really seem to be too put out. Her main concern appeared to be whether still she would pass as virginal to the next young man who came along. It makes her sound so terribly awful, doesn't it? But she wasn't. It was just how people were. How they came to see things. Nowadays … what is it …? Fifteen, eighteen years later, it all just seems so utterly unthinkable. But then—well, life was hanging on a thread, you see. This is what you have to remember. So fine a thread. Everyone—and particularly the young and untried—was terribly aware of that.

Jim, well … I had known him for a little bit. Not too long. Later, he used to say to me “Do you remember? Ay? Do you? Ay? That evening we met, Mill? That were an evening, ay?” Yes, I'd say—course I do, Jim. But I didn't. Had no recollection of it at all, and normally I'm very good about that sort of thing. Observant. Very retentive. But there. Speaks volumes, I daresay. Anyway—Jim, he was what my mother, had she still been alive at the time, would have dismissed as common. And she would have been right, of course. He still is. It seems unbelievable to me now, but I'm not at all sure that I noticed at the time. The way he spoke. His table manners, or the total lack of them. The unspeakable things he would do with his fingers. And, of course, the fact that we had no interests whatever in common. Or more to the point, the fact that Jim had and continues to have no interests at all that I've ever divined, beyond his ironmonger's shop. Beer and budgerigars, if you count such things. I am sure he has never read a book. I mean in his life. I really do mean that. He called me Mill. Never Milly, just Mill. Which I absolutely hated, and I told him so. Made not a blind bit of difference. And still he persists with it. But … he
was quite good-looking in those days, I suppose, in a roughish sort of a way. I thought if we married, we'd at least have beautiful children. And he had this way of cocking an eyebrow that for some reason or another would always make me laugh. In the manner of a budgerigar, conceivably. It doesn't now, make me laugh. I'm not even sure if still he does it. Couldn't tell you.

Anyway, he was amusing enough. He must have been. We had one night, just the one night together before he had to get back to barracks. He never did leave these shores though, Jim. Never was posted abroad. Something to do with his feet, he told me. Or his ankles. Something. But that night, though—that one single night … oh dear God, that I well remember. How could I ever forget it? It had only been a Registry Office wedding—over before it got started. Eunice was there—can't remember who else. Some rather awful friend of Jim's. Very few, though. And Jim, he had booked this room, little room, above a pub. The smell of stale ale rose up through the floor. The bed, it nearly filled the whole of the space—though still, I remember thinking, it did seem very narrow. For two people, I mean. It creaked, the metal frame, even when you so much as touched it. Jim was down the corridor “attending to nature,” as he called it. He still does say that: “Won't be a jiffy—just got to attend to nature.” Oh dear Lord. Anyway—I sat on the corner of the bed … not sure there even was a chair … and I felt so cold. In every sense, really. There was a draft from the grimy window, there was linoleum on the floor—no hint even of a bedside mat. And within me, of course, I was utterly frozen. I had thought about this moment—women do, I think. And you wonder. Well you go through very many moods, I suppose: curiosity, dread … embarrassment, chiefly. A sort of excitement, just possibly. But not in my case. Here was simply something to be got through: we were good at that, during the war—getting through things. There was rarely
any choice in the matter. So here, I thought, was just one more little thing to be endured: couldn't last forever, could it? Everything comes to an end. And it wasn't going to kill me. Was it? He still smelt of beer when finally he came to me. He told me to be brave. “Be brave,” he said to me, as he fooled around with his braces. And I had to laugh. What a buffoon, I thought: what an utterly perfect buffoon. Bravery was not required, which is just as well. I still am not quite sure that he even managed what I would say to be penetration. And then he was snoring, and hogging the eiderdown. Anyway, I thought, with not inconsiderable satisfaction: it is done. I have got over it. As I knew I would. For I am, as I say, a capable woman.