London Pride (14 page)

‘What a blessing Dad's not here,' Mum said.

‘He'll have to know,' Aunt Maud said. ‘It could affect the cottage, being tied an' all.'

‘Heaven help us!' Mum cried. ‘Oh Heaven help us. How could she
do
such a thing?' And she put her apron over her
head and began to weep, holding the folds of cloth against her eyes.

‘What is it, Mum?' Peggy asked. It was too awful to see her mother crying and not to know what was the matter, especially as she suspected it was something to do with Joan. Who else could ‘she' be?

Mum put the apron down at once, stopped crying and glared at her. ‘Never you mind,' she said. ‘It's something too shameful to talk about. Too shameful altogether. I don't know how she could have done such a thing, I really don't. You're not to say a word to anyone, either of you. I shall be out all day if I'm any judge. I'd avoid it if I could, as your aunt knows, but that's something I'm not to be allowed it seems. You can look after Baby, can't you?'

‘I'm going swimming this afternoon,' Peggy pointed out.

‘Oh that's all right,' Mum said. ‘She can go with you.'

So she'd been lumbered with Baby all day, and Mum had gone rushing off without saying where she was going, and it all reminded her just a bit too much of that awful time when Dad was dying. She'd tried to be sensible, helping Aunt Maud with the scrubbing and feeding the pig and not saying anything, but her anxiety grew by the hour, especially when dinner-time came and Mum wasn't back.

She and Baby spent the afternoon in the swimming-pool and they were very late home because Baby dawdled back in the most aggravating way, picking wild flowers in the hedges and sitting down three times because her legs were aching. But eventually they arrived at the open kitchen door with the sun warm on their backs and the toes of their sandals white with dust, tired and thirsty and ready for tea. And what they saw and heard in the little dark room made them stop, stand absolutely still and listen with straining ears.

Mum and Aunt Maud were sitting at the table with their heads close together, talking to one another like conspirators and so deep in conversation that they didn't notice the children were there.

‘So when'll it be?' Aunt Maud was saying.

‘Wednesday,' Mum said. ‘First thing.'

‘The sooner the better. Providin' they pay.'

‘Oh they'll pay!' Mum said grimly. ‘Bein' it's their rotten son.'

‘Let's hope it works. You never know with these things. Sometimes they don't do the trick.'

‘Don't even say it, Maud.'

‘How far gone is she?'

‘She don't know, silly girl. Leastways she says she don't know.'

‘Is she showin' yet?'

‘No.'

‘That's a mercy.'

And at that point Baby shuffled her feet. The conversation stopped like an electric light being switched off. Both women looked up and became artificially bright and cheerful in an instant.

‘There you are!' Mum said. ‘Ready for your tea, are you?'

It's something terrible, Peggy thought. She's hiding it just like she hid Dad's illness. She never told us he was dying and he was, and now she's not telling us what's the matter with Joan, so it must be something really awful. ‘How's Joan?' she asked, her face taut with worry and determination. ‘Did you see her?'

‘She's been a bad girl and lost her job,' Mum said, still using that artificially cheerful voice. ‘She's coming home on Wednesday.'

‘Is she ill?'

‘No, she's not,' Aunt Maud said. ‘It'ud be a darn sight better for her if she were. An' that's my opinion of it.'

‘Well we don't need to go into all that, do we?' Mum said, and this time her voice sounded as if she was giving Aunt Maud a warning. ‘I'll make the tea.'

There was no sense in any of this. The more Peggy thought about it the less she could find. Joan was in trouble. That much seemed plain. But if she was in trouble, then being ill would make things worse not better. And if she'd gone somewhere she'd know where she'd gone. And what was it she was supposed to show? Well she won't come home on Wednesday, she thought, because Mum said something was going to happen on Wednesday, first thing, so I'll bet she's going to court. People usually went to court when they got into trouble and then they got fined or sent to prison. Poor Joan. She'll never be able to
pay a fine, so I suppose they'll send her to prison. I wonder what she's done. Perhaps they put you in prison if you shout at people when you're in service. But that didn't seem probable, not really. She'd have liked to send her poor sister a letter but she knew Aunt Maud wouldn't supply the stamp in her present acid mood. It was very worrying.

However on Wednesday morning it looked as though Joan would be coming home after all, for she and Baby were woken up early so that they could take their things next door to the Matthews' house before they went to school.

‘Your sister'll need the bed,' Aunt Maud said. ‘It won't be for long. An' you see you behave yourselves when you're next door. I don't want complaints. Remember we're in a tied cottage and we're in enough trouble as it is.'

All day long, as the lessons droned interminably on, Peggy thought about Joan and wondered what she'd done and how she was getting on in court. When four o'clock came at last, she set off for home at once, dragging Baby by the hand, no matter how much she protested.

Mum and Aunt Maud and Grandpa were all in the kitchen but they weren't speaking to each other and there was a really terrible atmosphere. Peggy didn't dare ask if Joan was home or upstairs or anything, in case it made things worse or gave Mum an attack of the nerves.

The two girls ate their tea in an oppressive silence, and washed the dishes without a word being spoken. Then the three adults sat in their chairs and didn't look at one another. Mum was busy with her mending and Aunt Maud was reading the Bible, which was a very bad sign, for she only read the good book when she was in a bad temper. And after a further hour's endless silence Mum cleared her throat and told the girls it was time they went next door to bed.

And next door to bed they went, tiptoeing into the Matthews' cottage as though they'd been told not to make a sound.

It was a double bed but an uncomfortable one with a very lumpy mattress so it took them a long time to settle in it. They were still awake when the shouting began. It came
from Aunt Maud's room on the other side of the wall and although they couldn't hear what was being said, the anger in the voices was unmistakable. It was Aunt Maud and Mum and Grandpa and they were shouting abuse at Joan, who was crying terribly, on and on and on. Now and then a word would rise out of the bedlam, sharp as a scythe, ‘Slut!' ‘Trollop!' ‘Disgrace!' and once Grandpa's voice shouted, ‘… better dead!' which made Peggy shiver with a sudden terrified cold.

The row went on for ages, but at last the door was slammed and the two listeners could hear angry feet stamping down the stairs and descending voices grumbling. But Joan went on crying.

‘Poor Joan!' Baby whispered.

‘You stay there,' Peggy whispered back, easing herself out of the bed.

‘What you going to do, our Peggy?'

‘Send her a message,' Peggy whispered. With her ears strained for any sound of movement from Mrs Matthews in the kitchen below, she crept quietly across the room to the dividing wall and tapped on it with her knuckles, once, twice, three times. ‘I wish they'd learnt us morse code at school.'

The sobbing stopped. Peggy tapped again. Both girls listened and waited. And then to their delight, their sister tapped an answer, faint through the plaster of the partition, once, twice, three times. It was a little triumph.

‘Now we can all go to sleep,' Peggy said, when she'd crept back to bed again. ‘She knows we're here an' she can knock if she needs us.'

‘Are they going to send her to prison, our Peggy?'

‘No,' Peggy said. Now that she'd sent her message she felt pretty sure of it. ‘They're not. I ‘spect we shall see her in the morning.'

But they didn't. And she didn't come down to supper in the evening either, although after Grandpa had gone off to the pub, Mum took a tray upstairs for her, which Peggy was relieved to see.

Aunt Maud was combing her hair ready for her prayer meeting. ‘I'm off,' she said, when Mum came downstairs again. ‘Time these children were next door.'

‘I'll take 'em when I've done the dishes,' Mum said.

‘I'll do the dishes if you like,' Peggy offered, feeling quite amazed at how artful she was being. ‘Baby's tired. Aren't you, Baby? She ought to go to bed straight away.'

For once in her life Baby had the sense to join in the plot, and even though the yawn she gave was too enormous to be credible, Mum believed her. The minute they were out of the door Peggy took off her sandals and ran up the stairs.

Joan was in the single bed, lying on her side with the covers pulled over her shoulders. Her face was very pale and her hair hadn't been combed and there were mauve shadows under her brown eyes. ‘Oh Peggy!' she said, and burst into tears.

Peggy was across the room in two barefooted strides, pushing the dangling clothing aside with both hands, and then she had her sister cuddled in her arms and was patting her back and kissing her cheeks. ‘You're all right,' she said. ‘You're home now. You're all right.'

‘I shall never be all right again,' Joan sobbed. ‘Never ever.'

‘You will. You will.'

‘No, no. I won't. I'm ruined. You don't know what I've done.'

‘I don't
care
what you've done,' Peggy said stoutly. ‘You're my sister and I love you and I think they were hateful to shout at you like that.'

‘I been dismissed without a character,' Joan confessed into Peggy's shoulder.

‘That just shows how hateful they were an' all.'

Joan sat up in the bed and moved her body away from Peggy's embrace so that they could look at one another. ‘You won't say that when you know what I done,' she said.

‘I shall.'

‘You won't, Peggy.'

‘Tell me an' see.'

It took a visible effort of will for Joan to say the next words and the shame on her face was painful to see. ‘I let them kill my baby, Peg. I was going to have a baby. I shouldn't have been. It was wrong. Only he said he loved me. An' they sent for Mum. It was awful, Peg. Awful. An' in the end I let them kill it. How could anyone forgive me
for doing that?' There was no hope for her. She was ruined just like Mum said.

Why it's like the kittens, Peggy thought, affection and pity for her poor tear-stained sister rising in a flood of warmth to redden her cheeks and make her eyes blaze. ‘Oh you poor thing,' she said. ‘What an awful thing. Did they put it in a bucket?'

‘What?' Joan said, stunned by the question. She was still aching and shocked from the brutality of yesterday morning's medical assault, the long hours of guilty pain that had torn her and the afternoon apart, the searing accusations that had left her weak and wretched all night. Oh if only she'd known all this was going to happen she'd never have let him lay a finger on her. Never. ‘What?'

‘In a bucket,' Peggy explained. ‘Like the kittens.'

But she could see it was the wrong thing to say while the words were still on her tongue. It made poor Joan cry worse than ever.

‘Never you mind,' she said, cuddling her furiously. ‘You can have another baby an' I'll look after you, an' we won't let them kill
that
one, I promise.'

‘Oh Peggy!' Joan said between sobs. ‘You are lovely!'

‘I'd better go down now,' Peggy said. ‘I've got the washing-up to do. I'll knock on the wall when I'm next door.'

‘Don't tell Baby what I told you, will you?'

‘No,' Peggy said standing up to go. ‘Course not. How long have you got to stay up here?'

‘A week I think,' Joan said wearily. ‘That's what Mum said anyway.'

It was a week, which was the sort of time Peggy told Baby she'd expect for a punishment.

‘What's she done?' Baby asked as they walked to school on the following Wednesday.

‘Shouted at someone,' Peggy lied, ‘so they sent her home without a character.'

‘Gosh!' Baby said in surprise, for her instincts were telling her it was something a great deal worse. ‘She must have shouted jolly loud.'

‘Well just don't mention it when she comes down tomorrow, that's all,' Peggy said.

‘No,' Baby said earnestly. ‘I won't.'

It was the last week of term. In three more days it would be the summer holidays and harvest time. And a jolly good job too, Peggy thought, for if Mum and Aunt Maud and Grandpa were all hard at work in the fields they wouldn't have the energy for shouting at Joan.

Unfortunately the corn wasn't quite ripe enough. She walked out into the fields to examine it every day and it was very slow. All that sun, she thought, squinting up at it, and it can't ripen
one
field. But at least life in the cottage was quiet now and more or less back to normal. She and Joan took it in turns to sleep on the floor the way they had before Joan went into service, and they helped Mum cook the meals and washed the dishes and scrubbed floors, and Joan worked with the rest of them, and nobody said anything much. In fact there wasn't any conversation at all, only an awful sense of brooding as though something terrible was going to happen, and that went on and on getting worse and worse until Thursday afternoon.

Mum had gone off to the pictures in Guildford as usual, Aunt Maud was visiting a neighbour on the other side of the seven acre field, and the three girls were sitting on Grandpa's little bit of grass in front of the cottage, Baby playing with her doll and Joan and Peggy mending a long tear in Aunt Maud's patchwork bedspread, when a shadow rose between them and the sun.