The Heart of the Family (11 page)

‘It’s what I want as well,’ Grace admitted, and for
once she didn’t object about someone seeing them when Seb pushed her gently back against the wall of the building they’d been standing next to and wrapped her in his arms to kiss her so passionately, that she ached for him with every single inch of her body.

‘That’s just a taste of how it’s going to be for us,’ Seb whispered thickly to her.

‘If that’s a promise—’ Grace began, trying to sound light-hearted.

But Seb stopped her, smiling tenderly at her as he told her softly, ‘No, it isn’t a promise, Gracie, it’s a vow; a vow of my love for you.’

‘Oh, Seb,’ she protested. ‘Now look what you’ve made me do, and I was trying so hard not to cry.’

Luke’s mood had lightened during the afternoon and now as they walked down to Sam’s allotment to ‘say good night’ Katie could feel the weight lifting from her heart, leaving her feeling almost dizzy with grateful relief. She loved him so much, but sometimes he made her feel so dreadfully unhappy.

‘I love you, Katie,’ he told her, his voice unsteady and thick with love.

‘And I love you too,’ Katie answered him going into his arms. But even as she responded to his kiss, a small voice was niggling at her, asking her, ‘But what if our love isn’t enough, what then?’

‘Mum?’ Sasha began.

Jean looked up from her knitting. The four of them – her and Sam and the twins – were sitting in the back room listening to the wireless whilst they waited for Katie to come back in from saying good
night to Luke. Then Jean would make their evening cocoa.

‘Me and Lou are going to see if we can get taken on at the telephone exchange.’

Jean looked at Sam, unable properly to conceal either her surprise or her relief.

‘You’ll be lucky if you get taken on there,’ Sam warned.

‘You’ve got to be sixteen,’ Sasha agreed.

‘And over five foot six inches,’ Lou added, ‘so that you can reach everything, and me and Sasha are just that, so that’s all right.’ She was trying desperately to pretend she was as pleased about the thought of becoming a telephonist as her twin, but it wasn’t easy, and she hoped that Sasha wouldn’t look at her and guess what she was really thinking.

‘Well, you’ll certainly be tall enough,’ Jean acknowledged. At five foot seven each they were a good three inches taller than she was, and taller than Grace, who topped her by an inch. ‘And you have good clear voices that people will be able to hear properly,’ she conceded.

‘All those songs we’ve practised; people need to hear the words, said Sasha, grinning.

It would be wonderful if they could get taken on at the Edge Lane exchange, Jean thought. If they did she’d have all her children close at hand.

Bella had just been on the point of leaving her parents’ house when they all heard the front doorbell ring. She’d had enough of listening to her mother going on and on about how shocked she’d been by Mrs Wrighton-Bude’s embargo on Charles’s family bringing any family members other than themselves to the wedding, and had even pointed out sharply to her mother that she didn’t know why she was making such a fuss about Auntie Jean and her family not being invited when she’d said herself previously that she was glad she wouldn’t be able to go.

Bella had only come round because she’d hoped to catch her father in a good mood, under the influence of his Sunday G and Ts. However, despite the fact that he’d already downed four large ones instead of his normal three, and had poured himself a fifth, his mood if anything was even more sour than usual. Bella had been hoping that with Charlie now definitely staying in the army and Daphne continuing to live with her parents after the wedding, not only would she get to keep her house but also she’d get an increase in her allowance out of him.

Vi frowned as the doorbell pealed a second time.
No one came visiting on a Sunday evening. It simply wasn’t done, at least not without an invitation and certainly not in Wallasey. She just hoped that that sewing woman who had been recommended to her did a good job of adding those new bunches of flowers to the hat she’d had for Bella’s wedding. She hadn’t intended to wear it again but seeing as no one she knew would be at Charles and Daphne’s wedding it seemed a shame not to wear the lovely outfit she’d had for Bella’s big day. And if it outshone Daphne’s mother’s outfit then that was just too bad, Vi thought grumpily as she opened the door.

‘You’re my Charlie’s mam, aren’t you? I’m Lena wot he’s going to marry and I’m sorry to land up on you like this, but I’m in ever such a fix. I dare say he’ll have told you all about me, and how I saved him when Bessie Street was bombed and how him and me are courtin’ now.’ As the words tumbled out one on top of another without her stopping to draw breath, Lena acknowledged that she hadn’t intended things to be like this. All the way up here from the ferry – she’d walked because she’d been told it would only take her half an hour but it had been more like three-quarters, and her nice red shoes were all dusty now, and she was all hot and sweaty, as much with nerves as anything else – she’d been practising what she was going to say, only to have it all come out wrong and in a muddle on account of her being so nervous.

She’d known that Wallasey would be posh but she hadn’t expected that her Charlie would live in a house as big as this one – with a car in the drive, an’ all. Wallasey was nothing like the streets that Lena was
used to with the houses in long rows and the pavements right outside the front door. All the houses she’d passed on the way up here had big front gardens and gates, there had been cars in the drives, and plenty of space around the houses even when there were two of them standing together.

She’d got that nervous that she’d walked up and down outside Charlie’s mam and dad’s house ten times and more whilst she tried to pluck up the courage to go and knock, telling herself that she was being plain daft to worry, since Charlie had told her that he loved her and she’d as good as saved his life, an’ all.

For once in her life Vi was lost for words. She stared in horrified disbelief at the creature standing on her front doorstep. She was on the point of slamming the door in her face when she suddenly realised that the neighbours might see the dreadful common-looking girl, so instead she stepped back into the hall, allowing Lena to come inside, and then quickly closed the door.

‘I’m reely sorry to dump meself on you like this, but I knew you’d understand, you being my Charlie’s mam, and me and him being the way we are with one another,’ Lena beamed in relief.

Hearing the unfamiliar voice and the strong Liverpool accent, Bella followed her mother out into the hallway, her eyes widening as she took in Lena’s appearance.

Bright red lipstick, a too-tight red dress and red shoes said quite plainly exactly what Lena was, and yet for some reason the sight of the bruise on her face and the anxiety in her eyes caused Bella to feel an unexpected pang of sympathy.

‘I don’t know who you are or what you think you are doing here,’ Vi began in a freezing voice as soon as she had got over her initial shock, ‘but if you know my son – which I very much doubt—’

‘Want do you mean?’ Lena interrupted uncertainly. ‘You are Charlie’s mam, aren’t you?’

Bella stepped forward. ‘Yes she is, and I am his sister.’

‘Bella …’ Vi began angrily.

‘Since Charlie’s friend has come to see us, Mummy, the least we can do is offer her a cup of tea,’ Bella told her mother, ignoring Vi’s furious expression and earning herself a grateful look from Lena.

‘Ooooh ta, yes, please. I’m fair parched. I haven’t had so much as a bite since me auntie threw me out this afternoon.’

‘Why don’t you come through to the kitchen?’

‘Bella,’ Vi warned again, but Bella ignored her, merely wrinkling her nose discreetly as Lena advanced towards her, preceded by the strong smell of cheap scent. She had lovely hair though, Bella acknowledged.

‘So you and Charlie are friends, are you?’ she asked Lena as she took her into the kitchen and set about filling the kettle, a domestic task that Bella would normally have disdained, but she was irritated enough with both her parents to relish the prospect of listening to this artless young woman describing her exact relationship with her brother. Charlie’s elevation to favourite child still rankled, as did the fact that he had stolen her jewellery.

‘We’re going to be married,’ Lena confided happily. She’d been a bit worried when she’d first seen Charlie’s mam, but his sister was friendly enough and a good-looker too.

‘Of course, it’s all happened a bit sudden like, but then that’s what it’s like when two people fall in love. I read that in
Fatal Passion
that was one of the library books I got for old Mrs Watson, who me auntie goes cleaning for. Well, she’s supposed to do her cleaning, only more often than not she makes me do it.’

‘So you and Charlie are engaged then?’ Bella encouraged Lena as she poured the now boiled water on the tea leaves, then opened the cupboard to remove the tin that held her mother’s black market Garibaldi biscuits.

Lena’s eyes gleamed when she was offered the biscuits. This was a bit more like it. But she hadn’t forgotten her mother’s training and she nibbled daintily on her biscuit and then crooked her little finger when she lifted the china cup to her lips.

Bella was struggling not to laugh out aloud. This girl really was priceless.

‘Oh, yes,’ Lena confirmed. ‘We plighted our troth the night Bessie Street got bombed and I rescued Charlie. Lying in the street, he was, where Dougie Richards’s men had left him after they’d beaten him up. It’s lucky for my Charlie that Dougie and his men got killed when the pub was bombed. A real nasty lot, they were, and no mistake. Told me he owed them some money, Charlie did.

‘Anyway I managed to get him into me auntie’s – they’d all gone down to the shelter, but I hadn’t bothered. Meant to be, it was, you see – me and your Charlie,’ she informed Vi before biting into a second biscuit, then saying, ‘Oh, pardon me,’ when her stomach suddenly rumbled loudly. ‘At least it’s not as loud as me uncle’s farts.’

Bella didn’t dare look at her mother, in case she
did burst out laughing. The passing of wind was something that did not exist in the Firth household. Edwin and Charlie were under permanent instructions to go to the back door if the need arose, and, of course, well-brought-up women did not have ‘wind’.

Sitting in her Charlie’s mam’s lovely warm kitchen, and with the sympathetic audience of his sister, Lena’s confidence was returning and with it her normal exuberant happiness.

‘Of course, I would have stayed at me auntie’s and waited for Charlie to bring me to meet you himself, like, but then me auntie found his battledress jacket, and she fired up, wanting to know what was going on and saying all sorts about me and him that just wasn’t true. She’s never liked me on account of me dad being an Eyetie. Said she’d get me uncle to take his belt to me, and she meant it an’ all.’

Now Bella frowned. Having had a physically violent husband herself she couldn’t help but understand how afraid Lena must have been, for all her insouciant air of confidence now.

Bella wasn’t as a general rule interested in or concerned about the way other members of her sex lived. If she made friends with another woman it was because it suited her to do so and she had some particular purpose in forming the friendship so it came as a shock to her to recognise that the unfamiliar emotions she was experiencing were sympathy for this young girl.

Listening to Lena it had suddenly come to Bella that there were two distinctly different kinds of women and that the line that divided them had nothing whatsoever to do with family background,
or even good looks. Girls and young women like her cousin Grace, like Daphne, and like the loathsome Trixie Mayhew whom her own husband had loved when he should have loved her, all belonged on one side of that line, the safe, respectable side, which meant that men married them. But she – and Lena, with her common-looking, too-tight dress and too-bright lipstick – were on the opposite side of that line, which meant that men cheated on them and used them. It was a sobering thought.

Bella wasn’t used to having such deep and uncomfortable thoughts, but then she recognised she was thinking a lot of things these days that had simply never occurred to her before. And thinking itself was new to her.

‘Well, really,’ Vi cut across Lena’s confidence, ‘I’ve heard quite enough of this nonsense. It’s disgraceful what some people will do. Bella, call your father, will you? It’s obvious that this … this person is making the whole thing up. There’s no way Charles would ever become involved with someone like her, even if he wasn’t already engaged to darling Daphne.’

On the contrary, Bella thought to herself, Lena was exactly the type of girl that would appeal to Charlie – for a bit of fun, though, and not marriage.

Whatever her mother might choose to think, Bella did not believe for one moment that Lena was a hardened little tart who had come round intending to threaten Charlie’s family into paying her some money, nor to make trouble. No, Bella thought almost protectively, the poor girl genuinely loved him, just as she herself might have loved Ralph Fleming if she hadn’t found out the truth about him in time. It was worse for Lena, of course, because she obviously
believed that Charlie had promised to marry her. Bella could guess what Lena had given Charlie in return for that promise.

Lena was oblivious to Bella’s sympathy. Her stomach was a mass of churning, furious indignation. She knew what Charlie’s mam was up to.

She stood up, her anger heating her face, as she challenged Vi fiercely, ‘You’re my Charlie’s mam, and I don’t like to be disrespectful but don’t think I don’t know what you’re after doing, lying to me like you have and saying that my Charlie is engaged to someone else when I know that he isn’t. I’m not that daft,’ she told Vi scornfully. ‘He told me himself that he loved me and that it’s me he wants to wed, and he wouldn’t have said that if he was already engaged to someone else. And he wouldn’t have done what he did neither. As good as married already, we are,’ she told Vi proudly, lifting her chin. ‘And you should be ashamed of yourself, making out that your own son is a liar.’

Vi was outraged. How dare this … this creature, in her common-looking clothes virtually push her way into Vi’s home, and then start accusing her of lying. It was only because she was the decent person she was that she wasn’t already telling Bella to telephone the police, Vi decided, ignoring the fact that the unpalatable ring of truth about the girl’s description of how she had come to meet Charlie, and her own knowledge of her son’s nature, made it more than likely that he had somehow got himself involved with this dreadful girl. No matter what he had told this Lena, Vi refused to believe that he had actually wanted to marry her. However, it was just as well that he wasn’t here. Dealing with the wretched girl
was better left to her and Edwin. Vi shuddered to think of how dreadful it would be if Daphne or, even worse, her parents were to somehow get wind of this common creature, especially before the wedding. How on earth would she be able to face her neighbours and her colleagues in the WVS? No, the girl had to be got rid of.

‘Bella,’ she instructed her daughter, ‘go and bring that photograph Daddy had framed of Daphne and Charles when they got engaged.’

Lena had been confident that nothing could make her believe that her Charlie was engaged to someone else, but the photograph his sister was holding out to her made the blood drain from her face and her heart drop like a stone.

‘Well, now?’ Vi demanded triumphantly. ‘What have you to say to that?’

‘There’s no need to rub it in, Mummy,’ Bella protested quietly.

Vi gave her an angry look. Really, Bella was so difficult these days, always setting herself against everything that Vi said or did. Vi didn’t know what she had done to deserve such an ungrateful daughter. When she thought of the money she and Edwin had lavished on Bella, and the chances she had had …

Even though she could see the evidence of Charlie’s engagement to someone else with her own eyes, Lena still shook her head, protesting shakily, ‘No! He can’t be engaged to someone else. It’s me he’s going to marry and me he loves. He said so, and he’s not the sort as would say summat like that if he didn’t mean it.’