The Heart of the Family (23 page)

‘I’ve lost count of the number of girls I’ve known who’ve thought that, only to get a nasty shock.
Personally I wouldn’t trust any man, but there you are, that’s me, and I know that there’s a lot of girls around who get taken in and don’t realise what’s going on until it’s too late. At the hospital where I was before, in Manchester, there was one poor nurse engaged to this army sergeant. Thought the sun shone out of him, she did, until she found out that he was as good as engaged to another girl as well. It’s this war that’s to blame, I reckon. Put a man in uniform and he thinks he can behave how he likes.’

‘Some men might behave like that but my Seb isn’t one of them, and just as soon as I’ve finished my training we’re getting married.’

Grace was longing to escape from Maureen and her cynical comments. She was beginning to suspect that the other girl actually liked causing upset and uncertainty to members of her own sex with her warnings about men not being trustworthy. As she’d said to Katie when she’d gone home to see her family earlier in the week, even though she knew she had nothing to worry about with Seb, Maureen’s comments were really beginning to get her down.

‘Marriage doesn’t stop them playing the field,’ Maureen was saying now. ‘I’ve heard of any number of married men acting like they was single just because they’re in uniform, but of course there’s always girls who will believe what they want to believe because they want to get married, and they’d rather hang on to a fiancé even if he is messing around with other girls. Of course, then you get that type of girl who sets her cap at a chap even if he is engaged to someone else. I’ve met a fair few of those in my time as well. There was a nurse I knew that used to boast about how many couples she’d broken up.’

‘Well, I don’t believe that what you’re talking about goes on anything like as much as you seem to think,’ Grace told Maureen spiritedly.

‘You’d be surprised,’ Maureen came back darkly, adding, ‘Work with any girls, does he, your fiancé? Only I’ve heard that you wouldn’t believe what goes on at some of these places where they’ve got men and women in uniform working together. I know that if I was engaged I’d certainly not want my fiancé working with other women.’

Although Grace wasn’t going to acknowledge it, Maureen had touched a bit of a sore spot. It had been only just over a week ago that Seb had mentioned in one of his letters that a contingent of young women operatives had now arrived on a training course to work under the guidance of the more senior operatives like himself, and that he was responsible for overseeing the ongoing training of four of these girls. He had described them to Grace as a jolly bunch, eager to learn and all showing promise, and then added that their desire to engage in out-of-hours larks was giving him a taste of what it would eventually feel like to be the father of spirited daughters. That comment had made Grace smile but she admitted that she had felt a small stab of jealousy of the four young women who were now spending more time with her Seb than she was. Sensibly, though, she had reminded herself that she spent more time with the male patients on her ward than she did with Seb, but that did not mean for one single second that she preferred their company to his or that she was about to transfer her affections to any of them. Even so, she did wish that Maureen wouldn’t go on so much in the way that she did.

‘So what happened then?’

Lena looked warily at Bella, who was sitting in front of her on one of the two chairs she had pulled out from the table in her immaculate and, to Lena’s eyes, very fancy kitchen.

‘I was working for a hairdresser and I’d got a room at her mother’s, only her mother threw me out this morning because …’

‘Because you’re pregnant?’ Bella supplied for her.

‘Yes. I thought I was just putting on a bit of weight. It was that much of a shock when she said.’

Bella tried to imagine being six months pregnant herself and being so naïve and ignorant that she hadn’t known until her landlady had pointed the reality out to her. To her own astonishment a tug of something that was close to sympathy closed its fingers round her heart. Sympathy for the baby, poor little thing, not for Lena, Bella told herself firmly.

‘And I’ve lost me job, an’ all, and then her that I was working for said that I’d have to go and see someone at the church and that they’d sort me out, only when I did, they said as how I’d have to go to this special place and that I’d have to give up my baby.’ Lena bent her head, her thin shoulders heaving as tears ran down her face and dripped onto the clasped hands she was moving so apprehensively on her lap.

‘I take it that the baby is Charlie’s, is it?’

For some reason Bella’s blunt question had Lena folding her hands protectively over her body.

Still dazed from the speed with which her life had so abruptly and uncomfortably changed in the space of less than a day, Lena still wasn’t sure what she was doing allowing Charlie’s sister to take charge of
her in the way she had, and she certainly had no idea why Bella had wanted to, but she had retained enough backbone to stand up for herself, at least where Charlie was concerned.

‘Yes it is,’ she answered, adding defensively, ‘And before you say anything, I’m not going to give it up, no matter what anyone says.’

Lena’s voice developed a note of defiant panic as she made this claim, and once again Bella was caught off guard by her own sympathy for the younger girl. She still didn’t know what on earth had motivated her to step in and protect Lena from the woman who had been attempting to bully her, never mind bringing her home with her.

‘Well, if you’re planning to keep it you’re going to have to invent a husband for yourself and a father for your baby,’ Bella told her frankly. ‘I suppose we could always pretend that you got taken in by some man who turned out to already have a wife when he married you. Yes, that’s what we’ll do.’

Bella stopped speaking abruptly. What on earth was she doing? She had only brought the girl back with her out of curiosity and because she had wanted to know if the child she was carrying was Charlie’s. She hadn’t forgotten that Charlie had stolen her jewellery, and had got away with doing so, so the opportunity to have the upper hand over him in any way wasn’t one she was going to miss out on, was it?

Discussing how Lena and her pregnancy could be given a decent veil of respectability wasn’t necessary for her to make use of that opportunity.

‘What, lie, you mean and pretend that I thought I was married?’

‘Yes,’ Bella confirmed, ‘and it will be even better if you met this chap somewhere else – Birmingham or somewhere – and he and his real wife are now dead. Not, of course, that it makes any difference to me what you do about the fact that you aren’t married. After all, it’s not as though I’m responsible for you or that,’ she told Lena, nodding her head in the direction of Lena’s belly.

‘Maybe not, but your Charlie is,’ Lena pointed out, surprising herself as much as she obviously had done Bella.

‘I wouldn’t say too much about that if I were you,’ Bella warned her. ‘It won’t do you any good and it could get you into a lot of trouble. My father is a very influential man in Wallasey. He’s on the local council, and besides,’ she relented slightly when she saw how alarmed Lena looked, ‘it will be much better for you and the baby if you do as I suggested and pretend that you thought you and the baby’s father were properly married. You’ll get a lot more sympathy that way.’

‘And no one will try and take my baby away from me?’

‘I shouldn’t think so,’ Bella answered. Privately she thought that the authorities had more than enough orphans to find homes for as it was, without taking on Lena’s as well.

‘Now look,’ she told Lena briskly, ‘you can stay here for tonight and then in the morning you can go back to Liverpool, and you can go and see the authorities and tell them what I’ve just suggested: that you thought you were married to this chap but now you’ve found out that he was already married to someone else and that he and his real wife are both dead.’

‘But what if they ask me for his name?’

‘Make one up – if he had been married already he’d probably have lied to you about his name anyway. Oh, and you’ll need a wedding ring. I’ve got one upstairs you can have.’ Her late mother-in-law’s thin gold band would be perfect. If it was too big then Lena could tell the authorities some sob story about her supposed husband telling her it had belonged to his mother.

‘They’ll give you a new ration book with coupons for the baby and sort you out with everything, including somewhere to stay. When the baby comes you can put it in a crèche and get yourself a job.’

‘But I’ve only just had new papers.’

‘Then tell them that you were so upset and ashamed about what had happened that you didn’t say anything until you realised that you were pregnant.’

Bella made everything sound so easy, but then things probably were easy for her, Lena thought enviously.

‘Haven’t you got something better to wear than what you’ve got on?’ Bella asked abruptly. ‘Only you’ll find that you’ll get much better attention from the authorities if you dress nicely.’

‘I’ve got me tea dress,’ Lena told her proudly, ‘but it’s too tight across me middle now.’

Bella thought of the maternity smocks folded away neatly upstairs in the chest of drawers on the landing. She’d bought them in a fit of defiance against her late husband when she’d first decided she was going to make sure that she fell pregnant. They’d never been worn. After all, there’d been no need, had there? She’d lost the new life she’d been carrying before there’d been any real need. The thought of giving this scruffy
little girl from the slums even one of her beautiful smocks filled Bella with a surge of angry hostility. They were far too good for her and would be totally wasted on her. On the other hand, the girl was here in her kitchen and if by some mischance someone should call round and see her here, Bella didn’t want her appalling appearance reflecting on her.

‘Like I said, you can stay the night, but first thing in the morning you’re going to have to leave. I’ll take you upstairs so that you can have a bath and clean yourself up properly. I can probably find you something better to wear as well,’ she added casually, telling herself that it was, after all, in her own interests to make sure that when Lena left she would be able to sort herself out. After all, Bella didn’t want her coming back, did she?

‘Go on. It’s you they’re yelling for out there.’

The comedian standing in the wings of the Shaftesbury Avenue theatre with Francine gave her a small shove as he urged her to go back on stage and take another bow.

They had had a good audience tonight, Fran acknowledged. The theatre had been packed, the result, she had heard, of a growing influx of American military into the capital, even though officially America was not at war.

Briefings and meetings were the reason for this influx, so it was being said, to discuss the number of young Americans who had volunteered to join the British war effort.

Francine knew nothing about that but she did know that men in American uniforms were an increasingly familiar sight in London.

She had arrived back in the country in late September and had quickly been invited to join one of the many shows in the city as its lead singer.

As she left the stage and headed for her dressing room her mind was on the speed with which she would have to get changed if she wasn’t going to be late to join a semi-official welcoming party at the Savoy for yet another batch of Americans, to which she had been invited as a member of ENSA. It was becoming quite common for members of the Entertainments National Service Association to be asked to attend official functions to provide a bit of ‘light relief’, and Francine suspected that before the evening was over she would be asked to entertain the guests with a couple of songs, and that it could well be the early hours before she was free to go ‘off duty’ and return to the small room she’d been allocated in an old-fashioned women-only hotel conveniently close to Shaftsbury Avenue.

She didn’t mind the extra hours of work. They helped her to stop thinking about Marcus. She’d thought she’d known all there was to know about emotional pain but she’d discovered that she’d been wrong and that each heartbreak was different and unique and unbearably painful in its own individual way.

What hurt most about losing Marcus was that she didn’t know if she had lost him because of the way she had been wrongly portrayed to him and accused of deliberately deceiving him by someone else, or because he himself had decided that he didn’t after all care for her as much as he had allowed her to think. Either way, the result was the same – she had lost him – but not knowing why was like a constantly
running sore that she was beginning to think would never heal. The loss of her son, not once but twice over, had been unbearably painful, but Marcus’s understanding of what she had gone through and his apparent acceptance of the fact that she had borne Jack out of wedlock and been forced to hand him over to Vi had done a great deal to ease a part of that pain. That Jack had been killed when a bomb had fallen on the Welsh farmhouse Vi had sent him to against Francine’s own wishes was a different kind of pain and, like the one she felt for Marcus, a pain that she knew could never be wholly eased. All she had wanted for Jack was happiness, and she had truly believed that by allowing Vi to adopt him she was doing the best thing for him. They had had such a very brief time together, not long enough for her to win his confidence sufficiently to be able to tell him the truth: that she was his mother. He had, though, she hoped, known that she loved him, and they had shared some happiness together during those few brief days when she had had him all to herself.