The Heart of the Family (14 page)

‘My dad was Italian,’ Lena felt obliged to tell her.

‘Dead, is he?’

‘Yes, both my parents were killed when a bomb hit the house.’

‘And now you’re all on your own. I’m surprised a pretty girl like you hasn’t got a chap in tow.’

Lena shook her head and then sipped her tea. She had thought she’d got a chap in tow. She’d thought she’d got Charlie. Well, she’d never make that kind of mistake again, would she? She might have been daft enough to be taken in by him, but she was a quick learner and she’d know better next time. She’d be better off taking a leaf out of Simone’s book and getting herself a nice little business going instead of reading library books and thinking daft stuff about falling in love.

Dolly took a swig of her tea and smacked her lips appreciatively before wiping the back of her hand over them and announcing, ‘You know what I reckon, I reckon it’s a crying shame that you’re going out with that dull schoolteacher of yours, our Gavin, when here’s a lovely girl like Lena who’d suit you much better.’

Lena had never felt more embarrassed. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Dolly’s grandson. Thank heavens that he did have a girlfriend.

‘There’s nothing wrong with being a teacher, Gran,’ Gavin was saying.

‘Well, I know your mother thinks the world shines out of her backside. How I ever came to produce someone like my Janet I’ll never know. Takes after her dad, she does, and no mistake.’

‘She’s done a lot for those little ’uns she teaches,’ Gavin defended his girl.

‘Oh, aye, she likes everyone knowing how good she is for going “slumming”,’ Dolly agreed. ‘Well, let me warn you, our Gavin, the trouble with them butter-doesn’t-melt-in-their-mouths wimmin is that
the reason it don’t melt is on account of them being so cold. What you need is the opposite of someone like her, with them dull schoolteacher looks of hers. What you want is a lively warm-hearted girl like Lena here. I’ll bet she isn’t the prim and proper type, and knows how to—’

‘That’s enough, Gran.’

Gavin’s voice was calm and pleasant but obviously its firm tone meant something to Dolly because immediately she heaved a heavy theatrical sigh and swigged what was left of her tea, turning her shoulder towards him as she did so, but still refraining from continuing to criticise his girl.

When Gavin went to take the empty mugs back to the farmhouse, Lena made good use of his absence to place her blanket on top of a bale to one side of the one Dolly had selected, and spread it out as Gavin had already done his grandmother’s.

‘That’s it,’ Dolly approved. ‘Then you lies in the middle and wraps the sides round you. Snug as a bug in a rug, like.’

By the time Gavin had returned Dolly was fast asleep and snoring her head off, but Lena was finding it harder to relax enough to go to sleep. The straw felt all scratchy, despite her blanket, and she suspected although she had tried to wrap it round herself carefully it must have slipped because one piece of straw was sticking into her leg as sharp as any needle.

It was no use, she was going to have to do something. She’d never sleep with that straw irritating her skin like it was.

Lena sat up.

‘What’s wrong?’ Dolly’s grandson asked her in the kind of voice that said that he didn’t really want
know and in fact that he didn’t want anything to do with her at all.

‘I can’t get me blanket right,’ she admitted, pushing it away and then attempting to stand up on the bare straw, only realising too late how slippery it was when she lost her footing and started to fall.

Gavin caught her before she hit the floor, swinging her up against his chest in a powerful hold, his hands biting into the soft flesh of her arms. Her senses reacted immediately to his alien male scent, her body stiffening in rejection of his closeness, her ‘Thank you’ stilted and quiet.

‘Give me a shout when you’ve got settled, then I’ll put the lamp out.’ His voice was curt, almost as though he disliked her, Lena recognised. Then, to her shock, as she looked at him she realised that he thought she had deliberately engineered her fall so that she would end up in his arms. Indignation and shame burned hotly inside her.

‘I can see what you’re thinking,’ she told him, ‘but I didn’t do it on purpose.’

She looked and sounded more like a child than a wanton little piece who’d been trying to flaunt herself in front of him and get a reaction from him, Gavin acknowledged. Dressed the way she was, though, it was hard not to think what he had thought. This war had brought out something in some girls that he didn’t like or approve of. He wasn’t one for free and easy ways, and he wasn’t inclined that way himself. His mother had seen to that.

‘I never said that you did,’ he answered.

‘No, but you looked like it was what you was thinking,’ Lena defended herself. ‘I’ll have you know
that I’m not the sort wot goes throwing herself at lads. As good as engaged, I …’

Mortified tears stung her eyes. She had forgotten for the moment how Charlie had deceived her.

Gavin saw the tears and frowned. She was only a bit of a kid really, too young to be on her own with no one to look out for her.

‘How old are you?’ he asked her brusquely. When Lena told him he exhaled heavily. ‘That’s too young to be as good as engaged, and if you was my sister—’

‘Well, I’m not. And anyway, it’s all over now.’

There was a note in her voice that told Gavin that she felt she’d had her heart broken, and despite himself he discovered that he felt sorry for her. She was only a bit of a kid. His mother would never allow either of his sisters to go out dressed the way she was, even now at their ages, never mind when they’d been as young as she.

His inbuilt sense of male responsibility made him want to do something to protect her but all he could think of to say was a grim, ‘It doesn’t do for a girl to go acting like she’s summat she isn’t, ’cos it will make other folk think she’s a bad lot.’

Lena was mortified and afraid. After all, wasn’t the truth that she
was
a bad lot now that she knew that Charlie wasn’t going to marry her?

‘See you here tonight then, Lena love,’ Dolly beamed at Lena as both she and Gavin helped the elderly woman off the bus.

‘They told me at the rest centre to go back today so that they can sort out me papers and get me a proper billet,’ Lena told her. She didn’t want to say outright that the last thing she wanted was to spend another night with Dolly and her grandson, especially after what had happened last night, and her making a fool of herself the way she had. She had seen from Gavin’s expression that he thought she’d flung herself into his arms like that on purpose and not because she’d been struggling with her blanket. Lena could feel her face starting to burn whilst the same angry humiliated tears that she had wanted to cry so many times since she found out how Charlie had deceived her threatened to spill over and betray her. Well, she wasn’t going to let them. She’d got more backbone than that, and she wasn’t going to let them that wanted to look down on her have the satisfaction of doing so. She certainly wasn’t. She’d survived the bombing, hadn’t she, and she would survive this as well.

Gavin frowned as he watched her. His heart had sunk when he’d first seen her. For all that she liked to pretend she knew what the world was about, his gran was, in reality, easily taken in. He’d taken one look at that short skirt and that hair and those liquid eyes and that soft pouting mouth, and he’d decided that whatever Lena had attached herself to his gran for, it wasn’t for his gran’s benefit. But last night reluctantly he had come to realise that Lena, for all her outward air of confidence, was in fact very naïve. She might look like she knew every trick in the book of how to attract man, but when it came to it she didn’t have a clue and it had been innocence and self-conscious anger he’d seen in her eyes when she’d fallen into his arms and not a come-on at all.

Poor kid. She wasn’t fit to be let out on her own. With those looks of hers she’d have every Jack-the-lad in Liverpool trying to take advantage of her. Not that it was any of his business.

‘Well, if you change your mind you know where to find us – same place as last night,’ Dolly repeated.

Lena nodded. She had grown unexpectedly fond of the old lady in the short space of time she had known her. At least Dolly accepted her, and not just that, but actually approved of her, although Lena could well imagine what Charlie’s mother and even her own auntie would have to say about Dolly. She’d better go and see Simone first, she decided after she had said her goodbyes to Dolly and Gavin. Then she could go back to the rest centre and sort out her replacement ration card and everything. And as for Charlie and her broken heart, she wasn’t going to think about them. There was no point in crying over
spilled milk. She’d just got to get on with things, hadn’t she?

Sasha and Lou had only gone to the telephone exchange to ask for application forms for jobs, but when these had been handed over to them they had been told to wait and had then been taken to a small room where they had had to fill in the applications under the eagle eye of a stern-looking grey-haired woman, who had introduced herself as Mrs Withers.

They had then been sent to the canteen for a cup of tea and told to wait, and they had been there for over half an hour. Lou had been on the point of suggesting to Sasha that they left when they had been summoned for a full interview.

That interview seemed to be taking for ever, Lou thought miserably.

There had been questions about their family – with Mrs Withers nodding her head over the fact that Grace was training as a nurse and Luke was in the army.

Then they’d been measured, a process during which Lou had held her breath, half hoping that they might turn out to be under the five foot six height requirement, and then hating herself when she had seen Sasha’s beam of relief when they had both turned out to be just over five foot seven. Because the switchboards were very high, even with a metal trim at the base of their seats for the telephonists to stand on, anyone under five foot six would not have been able to reach up to get the plugs in the necessary holes fast enough.

If their application was successful, they would be trained on dummy switchboards, Mrs Withers told
them, after she had given them both individual mental arithmetic and verbal tests, and they had read out a series of numbers and then a paragraph from a sheet of paper for her.

It had been warm outside when they had arrived, but now, shut in this bleak, windowless room, Lou was beginning to feel trapped and cold and desperate to escape. Sasha, though, was nodding her head and listening intently whilst Mrs Withers explained to them what their training would involve. Her twin had turned her chair slightly to one side so that Lou couldn’t even catch her eye in that special way they had always had. Lou felt as though a heavy weight had settled inside her.

‘Thank you. We’ll be in touch,’ Mrs Withers told them both briskly, indicating that the interview was over.

‘Oh, Lou,’ Sasha announced breathlessly once they were back outside, ‘I do hope they take us on. It would be just perfect. We’re only ten minutes or so away from home, and the canteen looked ever so nice and clean.’

Lou forced herself to agree as she tried to pretend to share Sasha’s excitement, but the truth was that she was already dreading the thought of working at the exchange.

Well, he’d done it, and there was no going back now, Kieran thought doggedly, torn between pride and the recognition that he’d get an earful from his mother when she found out what he’d done. But he hadn’t had any choice really, had he? He’d had a taste of his uncle Con’s life and for a while he’d thought that he could take to it, but then he’d seen the way that
other lads – lads in uniform – looked at him, and the way the prettiest girls looked at them and he’d begun to think that maybe working with his uncle wasn’t such a good idea after all.

It was that business with the twins that had made up his mind, though – not that he would ever let on to anyone about that. They’d think he’d gone soft in the head if he did. It hadn’t been his fault that they’d gone running off the way they had and one of them had nearly got herself killed. But somehow the whole thing had stuck inside his head and had made him feel uncomfortable. Anyway, it was too late to start worrying about why he’d done what he’d done now. He’d done it. He looked back at the RAF recruiting office he’d just left, and his chest started to swell with a mixture of pride and apprehension. Another twenty-four hours and he’d be reporting for duty as Aircraftman Mallory.

‘So what time do you call this then?’ Simone demanded as soon as Lena walked into the salon, standing with her hands on her hips and an angry frown on her face.

‘I’m sorry,’ Lena tried to apologise, ‘only—’

Ignoring her, Simone reached out to pluck a piece of straw from Lena’s sleeve.

‘And what’s this? If you’re late coming in to work because you’ve been rolling around in some field with a lad—’

‘No I haven’t—’ Lena began to defend herself.

But before she could say any more the shop door crashed open and Lena heard her auntie saying angrily, ‘So you are here, then? I’m surprised at you, Simone. I’d have thought you’d want to be rid of
her in case she gives your business a bad name. Or hasn’t she told you what she’s bin up to yet?’

Fortunately there were no customers in the salon, nor any due as it was only Monday morning. Even so, Simone jerked her head in Lena’s direction and told her sharply, ‘You’d better put the lock on the door.’

Whilst Lena was doing as she had told her, she could hear Simone asking her auntie, ‘So what’s this all about then?’

‘It’s about her doing what she shouldn’t with some army lad – aye, and boasting about it, an’ all, claiming that he’s going to marry her. As if anyone would believe that. I allus knew she’d turn out like this. Her own mother used to say she’d got bad blood in her. Well, she’s not going to be carrying on under my roof any longer, so you needn’t come crawling back just like you’ve done nowt wrong, if that’s what you were thinking of doing,’ her auntie Flo told Lena nastily. ‘I’ve got my Doris to think of. She’s a decent respectable girl, who’s about to get a decent respectable chap’s ring on her finger and I’m not having her shamed in front of her in-laws-to-be on account of having you as her cousin. You can take yourself back off to wherever it was you spent the night last night and you can stay there. And if you’ve any sense you’ll give her her cards, an’ all,’ Lena’s aunt told Simone, ‘’cos I’m telling you now you’re going to lose a lot of customers if they come in and find her working here when they hear what she’s bin up to. As for you,’ she added turning back to Lena, ‘it won’t just be my Alfred’s belt you’ll be feeling if you try to come back.’

‘But what about my things? My clothes and my ration book,’ Lena protested.

‘What ration book? I ain’t got no ration book of yours. See?’ She turned to Simone. ‘See what a liar she is, trying to mek out I’ve got her ration book. You want to think yourself lucky I don’t report you to someone in authority – trying to mek out that a respectable woman who’s done nowt but put herself out to give you a good home is trying to thieve off you. And as for your clothes, I’ve sent the lot of them off to one of them places that takes stuff like that. Best place for them.’

She’d gone before Lena could say a word, slamming the door so hard that the whole frame shook.

‘It isn’t true what she said about me ration book. She has got it,’ Lena told Simone.

‘And this soldier lad – what about him? Is that true?’

Lena hung her head. ‘He said he loved me and that we was going to be married.’

‘And you believed him?’ Simone shook her head in disbelief. ‘I thought you’d have known better than that. Not left you wi’ owt you wouldn’t want to be left with, has he?’

‘Just his jacket,’ Lena told her, missing the point of what Simone was trying to say.

Simone gave her an exasperated look. ‘I thought you’d have had more about you than to fall for some lad spinning you a yarn just so that he could get into your knickers. Well, I hope you know where you can find him, just in case. That’s all I can say.’

‘He’s getting married to someone else.’ Lena bit down hard on her bottom lip. ‘I went to see his mam last night and she told me.’ She couldn’t bring herself to admit to Simone exactly what had happened.

‘Well then, I dare say you’ll know better the next
time, won’t you. Lads will tell you owt when they’re after a bit of how’s your father, you daft head, especially lads in uniform. I won’t be able to keep you on here now, you know that, don’t you?’

Lena made a strangled sound of protest, the blood draining from her face.

‘But I’ve got to have a job. I can’t join up or go into munitions. I’m too young, and I haven’t got me papers. They’ve told me to go back to the rest centre later and they’ll sort me out with some new ones.’

‘Then you’ll have to tell them they need to sort you out with a new job as well, won’t you? It’s no use you looking at me like that, Lena. You’re a good worker and that hair of yours brings in the customers but there’s no getting away from the fact that them looks of yours turn them away.’

‘Because I look Italian?’

‘That, and on account of you being as good-looking as a film star. Some of them don’t like that, see. They see their men hanging around eyeing you up and it’s you they blame and not them. That’s human nature, Lena, and the sooner you recognise that the better. They see their chaps eyeing you up and they blame you ’cos you’re young and pretty and they aren’t, but they won’t admit to that so they say that it’s because you look a bit Eyetie and that Eyeties should be locked up on account of that Mussolini of theirs.’

‘You could cut my hair and I—’

‘It’s no use you trying to soft-soap me, Lena. If it was left up to me I’d keep you on but I’ve worked hard to build up this business, and a nice little earner it is now, an’ all, but if I get me clients dropping off because of you then I’d have to sack you anyway
’cos there wouldn’t be any work for either of us, would there, so it makes no sense me keeping you on. You must see that.’

Lena could.

‘Look, I’ll tell you what,’ Simone offered, relenting. ‘I’ll give you the name of a friend of mine wot runs a salon near the Royal Court Theatre. She gets a load of them girls from there going in to her, and some of the stars as well. I’ll write you a note to give to her, saying that you’ll do her nicely as a junior, but I’m not making any promises that she’ll tek you on, mind,’ she warned as Lena’s face broke into a smile of grateful relief.

As she checked through the unfinished paperwork Laura had left behind when she had taken off for another visit to her family – without so much as a by-your-leave either – Bella tried not to let Lena’s image from last night come between her and her work, but the young girl with her common-looking clothes emphasising her curves in a way that had been so much at odds with her pitifully naked pain when she had learned the truth about Charlie, insisted on intruding. So much so that in the end Bella gave an exasperated sigh and pushed to one side the paper containing the growing list of mothers wanting to enrol their children at the nursery, and stood up.

It was another warm day – she had been able to walk to the school earlier wearing a thin pink cardigan over her floral silk dress with its patterns of rich pinks and blues.

As she picked up her handbag, her sunglasses and her gloves she called out to the nearest of the
nursery staff, ‘Aggie, I’ve got to go out. I won’t be very long.’